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Assessing the Social and Environmental Impacts of Critical Mineral Supply Chains for the Energy Transition in Europe

Advanced technologies are inherently dependent on critical minerals and their related metals. The mining extraction of these critical minerals leads to significant social and environmental impacts that extend beyond the regions where those advanced technologies are ultimately used. This study explores the global socio-environmental challenges arising from the European Climate Law's aim for net-zero ...

Inheritance tax reform

The aim of this research project is to examine the revenue and distribution effects of inheritance tax reforms proposed.The tax privileges for business assets (including the exemption requirement test) and for rented apartments are to be abolished. In order to reduce liquidity impact the tax liability is to be deferred or annuitized with interest. Furthermore, personal allowances and the tax rate...

SOEP alumn Jule Adriaans awarded Peter A. Berger Prize by the German Sociological Association

Dr. Jule Adriaans was awarded the Peter A. Berger Prize 2024 for her dissertation on “Distributive Justice: Definition, Determinants, and Consequences of the Justice of Earnings.” After Adriaans, a SOEP doctoral candidate (2018-2022), completed her PhD at the University of Bielefeld, she accepted a postdoc position at its Faculty of Sociology. Her work focuses mainly on income inequality and justice, ...

Bad Luck or Bad Decisions? Macroeconomic Implications of Persistent Heterogeneity in Cognitive Skills and Overconfidence

Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and increases with overconfidence thereon. Guided by this and other micro evidence, we add persistent heterogeneity ...

Does Gender of Firm Ownership Matter? Female Entrepreneurs and the Gender Pay Gap

We examine how the gender of business-owners is related to the wages paid to female relative to male employees working in their firms. Using Finnish register data and employing firm fixed effects, we find that the gender pay gap is – starting from a gender pay gap of 11 to 12 percent - two to three percentage-points lower for hourly wages in female-owned firms than in maleowned firms. Results are robust ...

Beyond Hot Flashes: The Health and Career Cost of Menopause

Menopause marks a crucial juncture in women's lives and careers, coinciding with the peak of their income and working hours trajectory. On average, a third of women encounter severe health problems during this phase, exposing them to the risk of adverse labor market and health outcomes. Leveraging Norwegian registry data, coupled with panel data on doctor visits related to menopausal issues and...

Determinants of Stock Market Participation

The low degree of stock market participation (SMP) is one of the big puzzles in finance. Numerous determinants have been proposed. We put these determinants into a structure that is derived from a standard static portfolio model. Then we discuss arguments put forward regarding specific SMP determinants and the empirical evidence that has been provided. The focus of our survey is on the identification ...

Exploring effects of life-like virtual interviewers on respondents’ answers in a smartphone survey

Inexpensive and time-efficient web surveys have increasingly replaced survey interviews, especially conducted in person. Even well-known social surveys, such as the European Social Survey, follow this trend. However, web surveys suffer from low response rates and frequently struggle to assure that the data are of high quality. New advances in communication technology and artificial intelligence...

Questioning Nuclear Scale-up Propositions: Availability and Economic Prospects of Light Water, Small Modular and Advanced Reactor Technologies

This paper addresses the pressing need for rapid decarbonization of energy systems by examining the role of nuclear power in future energy scenarios collected in the IPCC database. Despite their explorative character, energy scenarios can influence decision-makers or might be used to promote certain technology developments. They are increasingly subject to the integration into real-world settings and ...

Avoid, Shift or Improve Passenger Transport? Impacts on the Energy System