Public Economics Department Events

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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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The political consequences of refugees for receiving countries have received much attention in recent years and have sparked a burgeoning literature. However, evidence on the long-run consequences of refugees is lacking. The expulsion of 8 million Germans (so-called expellees) from Eastern Europe to post-WWII West Germany serves as a natural experiment that allows us to estimate the long-run ...

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The part-time wage penalty is a key contributor to the gender wage gap. In this paper, I study how the part-time penalty decomposes in a lack of promotions to higher paying levels of the career ladder and a lack of wage growth conditional on the career level. I develop a dynamic model of labor supply that distinctly features hierarchical wage structures and promotions. I estimate the ...

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Long periods of part-time work lead to a stagnation of wage growth. In this paper, I study how the wage stagnation decomposes in lack of career development and the lack of wage growth conditional on the career level. I develop a dynamic choice model of labor supply which distinctly incorporates vertical career moves to jobs paying higher wages as a function of the choice of hours of work. I ...

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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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