Public Economics Department Events

We quantify labour market effects of changes in the potential benefit duration (PBD) in Poland. Individual workers' PBD depends on the county unemployment rate relative to the national average---12 months of PBD above a cut-off of 125 per cent and 6 months below. This cut-off shifted from 125 to 150 per cent in a 2009 reform. We utilize (i) the natural experiment of the reform and (ii) the ...

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This paper analyzes the impact of women's managerial representation on the gender pay gap among subordinates on the establishment level using German Linked-Employer-Employee-Data. For identification of a causal effect we employ two estimation strategies: 1) a panel model with establishment fixed effects and 2) an event study estimation around a discrete shift in managerial representation. We find ...

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We develop a comprehensive life-cycle model of elder parent care and work to evaluate options that address pressing conflicts between pension and long-term care (LTC) policies. Many OECD countries react to challenges of demographic change by increasing LTC by family members (informal care) and raising retirement ages. This intensifies conflicts between paid employment and informal care provision. ...

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In this paper, we estimate a structural dynamic discrete choice model of informal as well as formal care provision, retirement and labor supply. The model allows to assess the dynamic consequences of providing informal care or organizing formal care for parents, e.g., due to reduced wages, pension benefits, or benefits from long-term care insurance. Further, it allows to analyze counterfactual ...

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In Germany, 200 to 400 billion euros are inherited or donated every year. Inheritances are unevenly distributed, with wealthy households receiving far greater inheritances than poor households, and inheritances and gifts are taxed only lightly compared with earned income. As inequalities are increasing, particularly since the onset of the COVID crisis, and governments are under pressure to find ...

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We explore the role of social mobility as driver of economic development. First, we draw the geography of intergenerational mobility of education for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over time. Then, through a novel weighting procedure that considers the aggregate participation of cohorts to the economy in every year, we estimate the effect of changes in mobility on economic ...

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Grandparents act as the third biggest care giver besides day care and parental care for children below the age of 6 in most OECD countries. Despite its relevance, the effects of child care provided by grandparents on child and parental outcomes have received little attention in the literature. We investigate the potential impact of grandparental care on children's ...

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Home visiting programmes are increasingly being implemented across the globe to help vulnerable families with young children, however longer-term experimental evidence on their health impacts on both parents and children is scarce. In this paper we study the medium-term health impacts of a randomized control trial to evaluate the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), one of the oldest home visitation ...

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This paper examines how culture determines within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting the setting of Germany's division and reunification, I compare child penalties of couples socialised in a more gender-egalitarian culture to those in a gender-traditional culture. The long-run penalty on the female income share is 30.9% in West German couples, compared to 18.3% in East German ...

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For the design of pension reform it is crucial to disentangle the employment effects related to the substitution and the income effect. In this paper we provide causal evidence about the importance of the income effect which in general has been assumed to be small or non-existent. We exploit a pension reform in Germany that raised pension benefits related to children. For ...

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Since the start of the century, particularly in urban centres, housing markets worldwide have experienced stark price and rent increases. As a consequence urban agglomerations have experienced strong changes in their neighbourhood composition with originally poorer, central areas gentrifying quickly. Governments have reacted by raising the topic of affordable housing on the ...

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This paper estimates a structural dynamic discrete choice model on parental care provision, retirement and labor supply. We want to estimate the dynamic consequences of providing informal care or organizing formal care for care dependent parents. While there might be negative long term consequences on wages and retirement benefits, agents might respond to incentives in the long term care ...

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What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression ...

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Workers in demanding jobs may be particularly negatively affected by an increasing statutory retirement age. We exploit a pension reform that raised the early retirement age of women from 60 to 63 years in Germany. Based on a large administrative social security data set we exploit the quasi-natural experiment using a regression-discontinuity approach. We find the same relative employment ...

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This study examines the relationship between air quality alerts and school absenteeism in New York City. Examining the effects of the alerts in school attendance is relevant because it helps us understand parents' avoidance behavior in situations of exacerbated exposure to air contaminants. Causality arises by exploiting the deterministic nature of the alerts with regression discontinuity ...

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Abstract:   Our research question is to what extent does the familiarity with the testing environment impact the relative performance of boys and girls in standardized testing. We use an RCT-design on the full population of students in Grade 6 and 10 across several subjects in the Region of Madrid (Spain). This standardized test was either "Externally" administered, meaning that teachers ...

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• Documents

We combine unique data that include all practitioner health diagnoses based on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) collected from all publicly insured individuals in Germany with a sizable cohort specific pension reform to study the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on health. For the analysis, we use a cohort specific regression discontinuity design. The ...

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Abstract:  User generated content is increasingly substituting content created by professionals. Local news that is generated by citizen journalists could be a promising way of supporting the struggling newspaper industry by reducing costs for professional journalists. We study a network of 122 local Austrian newspapers operating a hybrid model of citizen and professional journalism. We first ...

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Summary:  This talk will provide a survey of several papers on the theory and practice of experimental design. I will compare different objectives (estimator precision, outcomes of participants, informing policy choice to maximize average outcomes, and informing policy choice to maximize utilitarian welfare), and their implications for experimental design. I will consider heuristic ...

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