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Wage Risk and Portfolio Choice: The Role of Correlated Returns

From standard portfolio-choice theory, it is well-understood that background risk, primarily due to wage risk, is one of the central determinants of individuals’ portfolio composition: higher background risk reduces risky investments. However, if background risk is negatively correlated with financial market risk, higher background risk implies a more risky investment. We quantify the influence of ...

Does Cognitive Reflection Relate to Preferences and Socioeconomic Outcomes?

Previous studies report associations of cognitive reflection, the ability to avoid intuitive but potentially wrong decisions by switching to a contemplative mindset, with individual preferences, mostly relying on student samples and laboratory settings. We assess the association of cognitive reflection with preferences in the general population and real-world socioeconomic outcomes. Our preregistered ...

Is the First Language a Resource, an Obstacle, or Irrelevant for Language Minority Students’ Education?

Successful integration into the education system is of major importance for the future prospects of immigrants and their children as well as for the social cohesion and viability of the receiving societies. Language is generally viewed as an important aspect of this integration. Whereas there is widespread agreement that the language of the residence country (L2) is crucial for students’ educational ...

Evaluating Sampling Methods for Ethnic Minorities

Ethnic minorities are often underrepresented in survey research, due to the challenges many researchers face in including these populations. While some studies discuss several methods in comparison, few have directly compared these methods empirically, leaving researchers seeking to include ethnic minorities in their studies unsure of their best options. In this article, I briefly review the methodological ...

Introduction to systematic and scoping literature reviews

The Power of Stereotypes and how they influence labour market outcomes (with Susanne Veit and Johanna Hildebrandt)

In this paper, we draw on two key models of stereotyping, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) and the Agency-Beliefs-Communion (ABC) to study whether stereotypes associated to ethnic minorities predict discrimination in hiring in the German labor market. In study 1, we examined the content of the stereotypes that Germans ascribe to 38 ethnic minorities, drawing on a large-scale online survey (N=2,3...

Unequal Estate Division for Wealth Perpetuation: Portfolios, Primogeniture, and Patrilineality (with Daria Tisch and Manuel Schechtl)

While inequalities in inter-vivos gifts and bequests between families are widely recognized as key drivers of wealth inequality, less is known about the unequal transmission of wealth within families. This study addresses this gap by asking: (1) To what extent are estates unequally divided? (2) How do estate portfolios, primogeniture, and patrilineality shape unequal estate division? (3) What is...

Conditional Permanent Residency and Refugee Integration: Evidence from Germany's 2016 Reform

This study examines the 2016 reform of Germany's Residence Act that intended to foster refugee integration by extending the waiting period for permanent residency from three to five years and introducing requirements, such as proficiency in German and partial financial independence. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we employ a difference-in-differences design to analyse...

The Effect of Public Sector Relocations on Regional Development in Germany

Regional economic disparities within countries have become increasingly large, often surpassing the disparities observed between countries. To address regional inequality, governments have been turning away from standard subsidies and are experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy. This paper estimates the causal effect of public employment reallocation on local...

Improving Migration Outcomes: A Mentoring Experiment and its Network Effects in Senegal (with Bernd Beber, Zara Riaz, and Juni Singh)

In this paper we study the effectiveness of a randomized migration mentoring program, and the role of network embeddedness at origin, for migration decisions and outcomes in rural Senegal. The mentoring program improves job expectations when migrating, migration experiences, and economic outcomes. When the mentoring is attended by randomly assigned migrant from the origin village, positive...