Publikationssuche - Test

The Hidden Homeownership Welfare State: An International Long-term Perspective on the Tax Treatment of Homeowners

Welfare is traditionally understood as social security decommodifying labour markets or as social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this article introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1901 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of ...

Today’s Older Adults Are Cognitively Fitter Than Older Adults Were 20 Years Ago, but When and How They Decline Is No Different Than in the Past

History-graded increases in older adults’ levels of cognitive performance are well documented, but little is known about historical shifts in within-person change: cognitive decline and onset of decline. We combined harmonized perceptual motor speed data from independent samples recruited in 1990 and 2010 to obtain 2,008 age-matched longitudinal observations (M = 78 years, 50% women) from 228 participants ...

Viral Shocks to the World Economy

We construct a global index of epidemic news based on text analysis of newspapers from 17 countries. We apply the index to study the economic consequences of epidemics on the world economy in structural vector autoregressions. Epidemic shocks exert significantly and persistently negative effects on output and prices that last for up to two years. There is no quick recovery and no overshooting. The ...

Working Life and Human Capital Investment: Causal Evidence from a Pension Reform

Associations of Socioeconomic Disparities with Buccal Dna-Methylation Measures of Biological Aging

Background: Individuals who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are at increased risk for aging-related diseases and perform less well on tests of cognitive function. The weathering hypothesis proposes that these disparities in physical and cognitive health arise from an acceleration of biological processes of aging. Theories of how life adversity is biologically embedded identify epigenetic alterations, ...

Earnings Trajectories After Divorce: The Legacies of the Earner Model During Marriage

Divorce marks the legal endpoint of a marital union. While divorce is increasingly seen as a ‘clean break’, the past marital history of the couple may nevertheless shape their present conditions. In particular, there may be a legacy of a highly gendered division of labour during marriage that may affect the ex-spouses’ earning trajectories beyond the date of divorce. Using register data from the German ...

Atypical Work, Financial Assets, and Asset Poverty in Germany

This study investigates how atypical employment (i.e., part-time, temporary work, mini-jobs) affects workers' ability to accumulate financial assets and exposes them to asset poverty in Germany. Asset poverty occurs when household financial resources (e.g., bank deposits and stock equity) are insufficient to live at the income poverty line for three months. Previously, studies on labour market processes ...

A Collective Blueprint, Not a Crystal Ball: Overcoming Political Stalemates: The German Stakeholder Commission on Phasing out Coal

The future of coal remains contested in many countries, hindering necessary energy transitions. Collaborative governance approaches, such as stakeholder commissions, have been proposed as potential solution to resolve such societal conflicts. In Germany, a stakeholder commission process managed to overcome the existing stalemate situation, leading to the adoption of a coal phase-out by 2038. Celebrated ...

Causal Misperceptions of the Part-time Pay Gap

In this paper, we analyze if an increase in the working life leads to more human capital investment via on-the-job training. We obtain RDD-estimates from a sharp date-of-birth cut-off, generated by a pension reform that increased the Early Retirement Age (ERA) by three years for many women in Germany. In our preferred specification, we find that this reform causally increased on-the-job training by ...

Selection, Socialization, and Risk Preferences in the Finance Industry: Longitudinal Evidence for German Finance Professionals

The financial sector plays a crucial role in society. Consequently, prior research has examined the preferences of professionals working in finance. However, these studies have tended to be cross-sectional and have neglected the dynamic roles played by (self-)selection and socialization. This paper uses longitudinal data from Germany to examine how individuals’ financial risk preferences affect their ...