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The Unequal Distribution of Bitterness: Tracing Ressentiment in Times of Change

Modern democracies are undergoing multiple, overlapping transformations, driven by globalization, digitalization, migration, inequality, and climate change. While some adapt with openness, others experience what Mau et al. (2023) term Veränderungserschöpfung – change fatigue: the sense that “too much is changing, too fast, and all at once.” This paper examines whether and how such fatigue...

Workshop on Applied Economics in Digital Health

The digital revolution in health care is changing how medical services are delivered and managed and how new products are developed. Economists from different fields have started to analyze how digital tools, IT, and novel sources of data are transforming health care delivery, markets, and regulations.  This workshop aims to provide a platform for researchers from health economics, industrial...

Information, Justice and Public Support for Carbon Tax-and-Divided Policies: Experimental Evidence from Germany

Carbon pricing can deliver large emissions reductions, but public opposition remains a key barrier. We study how support for carbon tax-and-transfer schemes depends on policy design and information provision in a large-scale survey experiment with German respondents. Explaining the policy mechanism robustly increases support across price levels. Information on distributional consequences raises support ...

The Rise in Absenteeism in 2022 Is Only Partly Due to Electronic Sick Notes

In Germany, employee absences due to illness rose sharply, particularly in 2022. Various sources argue that the introduction of the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU) caused this. Official data previously did not include absences that were not reported to health insurance providers; since the introduction of the eAU, this is no longer the case. This gap does not exist in Socio-Economic ...

Climate concerns in Germany have been growing since 2013

Climate Concerns Are Increasingly Affecting Germans

Climate change triggers anxiety in many people. Concerns about the consequences of climate change vary significantly not just by age and generation but also over time. Using German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data, this Weekly Report examines the extent to which these differences stem from age-related effects, generational socialization, or year-specific events. The results show that climate concerns ...

Clara Schäper has successfully defended her dissertation

Clara Schäper, Research Associate in the Public Economics Department and Gender Economics research group and Ph.D. student at the University of Potsdam, successfully defended her dissertation entitled “The Personal is Political: Five Essays in Labor and Family Economics” on May 12, 2026. She was supervised by Katharina Wrohlich and C. Katharina Spieß. Congratulations!

Review of Proxy Vector Autoregressive Analysis

In structural vector autoregressive analysis, it has become quite popular to identify some structural shocks of interest by external instruments or proxies. This study points out a variety of areas where such proxies have been used and sketches the way the proxies have been constructed. It reviews identification and estimation methods that have been considered in this context. Moreover, it points out ...

Lamfalussy Research Fellowship for Gökhan Ider and Hedda Thorell

We are proud to share that our PhD student Gökhan Ider (Freie Universität Berlin) and Hedda Thorell from Stockholm University were awarded the Lamfalussy Research Fellowship 2026 by the European Central Bank. They are among five fellows and will work on their paper "News-driven fluctuations and monetary policy transmission" during their fellowship. The Lamfalussy Fellowship program was launched in ...

Meeting Climate Targets under Distortionary Fiscal Policy: Directed Technical Change and Learning-by-Doing

I study optimal implementation of climate targets in a model with distortionary fiscal policy, learning-by-doing, and directed technical change. The key mechanism is that fiscal constraints link innovation policy to labor allocation, creating a tension between directing research and directing learning-by-doing. Analytically, I show that learning-by-doing shapes the effectiveness of carbon taxation ...