Public Economics Department Events

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This paper evaluates the effects of immigration on health in the workplace. Using rich linked employer-employee data, I demonstrate that firms with a higher concentration of foreign workers experience lower rates of long-term sick leave among native employees. The effect on the total sick rate is smaller in magnitude. The results are consistent with foreign employment alleviating understaffing and ...

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This study examines how conditional aid eligibility influences students’ application behaviors using extensive data from the French national application platform, Admission Post Bac (APB). Employing a generalized difference-in differences approach, we analyze the impact of an exogenous change in the income threshold for financial aid eligibility. Our primary focus is on high-achieving students, a ...

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Stock market participation jumped upwards in Germany in the year 2020 by about 25%. A major cause for this was the enforced use of remote work. We show this by repeating a benchmark study with demanding data requests and adding remote work to the explanatory variables. Moreover, we implement an instrumental variables estimation based on commuting distance and work-from- home capacity. The ...

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Two significant drivers of a person's financial situation in old age are pension income and costs for long-term care dependence. Both are unknown when the person makes her most important financial decisions, which makes it particularly interesting to understand her beliefs about them and how they influence her choices. In a representative survey, we elicit detailed expectations about individuals ...

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Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions in the corporate sector such as on company boards. One of the reasons for this underrepresentation are gender stereotypes on the skill distribution, social and occupational roles, personality traits, and how they affect labor market decision making. Media plays an important role in transporting gender stereotypes. In this paper we ...

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In the recent economic crises, Germany has made use of job retention schemes and in particular short-time work benefits ('Kurzarbeit') to tackle shocks in labor demand. Under these schemes, workers have not been laid off and received unemployment benefits, but reduced their working hours (or stopped working) for a limited amount of time while receiving short-time leave benefits. While the effect ...

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This study examines how inheritance and gift tax systems in combination with gendered parental transfer behavior strengthen gender wealth inequalities. Gender differences in transfers can be reproduced if men benefit differently than women from tax exemptions. This might happen when men and women receive different types of assets where only some are tax exempted. To investigate gendered parental ...

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We study the incentive and labor market effects of disability benefit programs using unique policy variation in Germany. In 2014, disability benefits of new recipients were increased considerably while eligibility criteria were not changed. We exploit this quasi-experimental policy variation to test the implications at two different margins. First, we analyze to what extent an increase in the ...

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This paper investigates the unique ways in which individuals assimilate new information into their beliefs about stock returns and examines the consequences of heterogeneous information processing on savings and investment decisions. Utilizing two exogenous information treatments from 2017 and 2018 surveys of German households, I discover that individuals' short-term return expectations shift by ...

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The Berlin School of Economics Applied Micro Seminar (BAMS) is a weekly research seminar, focused on labor economics, industrial organization, political economy and related areas in applied microeconomics. It is jointly organized by DIW Berlin, Hertie School, HU Berlin, FU Berlin, TU Berlin, WZB, ESMT Berlin, University of Potsdam, European University Viadrina, BCCP and SFB TRR 190. BAMS is one of ...

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Policymakers widely use tax-based incentives to spur investment and stimulate economic growth. Tax policy has been at the center of emergency measures during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is now as countries face a significant deterioration in public finances. Yet, empirical tax research is still in disagreement on how taxes affect business investment. We investigate the effect of local business ...

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This study uses administrative data on the universe of students in tertiary education in Germany and shows that university enrollment depends negatively on the local unemployment rate at high school graduation. This finding contradicts common evidence on countercyclical US undergraduate enrollment. Students' financial dependency and loan aversion suggest reduced parental income as dominant ...

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Unexpected crises, such as armed conflicts, natural disasters and pandemics require immediate government decisions on how to act to protect the population. The COVID-19 pandemic was the worst sudden onset global crisis since the Second World War, and highlighted tension between civil liberties and public health objectives. How did attitudes towards democracy respond to restrictive policy ...

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*************POSTPONED*****************To promote integration, the German government enacted the Residential Obligation Act (Wohnsitzauflage) in 2016, which obliges refugees to maintain their residence in the states to which they have been assigned for a period of three years from the time they are granted asylum or temporary residence. Studies addressing this policy have found controversial ...

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This paper exploits unique variation induced by two information treatments on a sample of German households in 2017 and 2018 to evaluate how subjective belief formation about stock market returns affects stock market participation and portfolio choice. I find that on average the information treatments do not shift individual expectations about returns significantly. Additionally, I show that ...

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