About 80 million people were displaced worldwide at the end of 2020. To support this highly vulnerable group, in recent years, local bottom-up initiatives proliferated to support refugee integration in hosting communities. This study examines a network intervention for refugees in collaboration with a social start-up whose mission is to match refugees and local volunteers to form friendships. We apply ...
Steam coal exporters face increasing uncertainty about future coal demand and risks of asset stranding. Nevertheless, new export-oriented coal mine projects are still brought forward. In this study, we use the coal sector model COALMOD-World to assess the economic prospects of investments in the export-oriented steam coal sector, and in particular of coal mines in the Galilee Basin, Australia. We parameterize ...
After the end of World War II in 1945, millions of refugees arrived in what in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany. We examine their effect on today’s productivity, wages, income, rents, education, and population density at the municipality level. Our identification strategy is based on a spatial discontinuity in refugee settlement at the border between the French and US occupation zones in ...
Exploiting the random allocation of asylum seekers to different locations in Germany, we study the impact of right-wing voting on refugees’ integration. We find that in municipalities with more voting for the right-wing AfD, refugees have worse economic and social integration. These impacts are largest for groups targeted by AfD campaigns and refugees are also more likely to suffer from harassment and ...
Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age inemployment. An important at-risk group comprises older employees who have worked in demanding jobs formany years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of early retirement options. Tomeasure differences in labor market reactions of employees in low- and high-demand ...
Humans possess a need for social contact. Satisfaction of this need benefits well-being, whereas deprivation is detrimental. However, how much contact people desire is not universal, and evidence is mixed on individual differences in the association between contact and well-being. This preregistered longitudinal study (N = 190) examined changes in social contact and well-being (life satisfaction, depressivity/anxiety) ...
This paper revives the question of whether a temporary VAT change is an adequate instrument for crisis stabilization. In empirical assessments, we find that durable goods consumption fluctuates strongly over the business cycle and that VAT rate changes affect durable goods in particular. Therefore, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that is capable of addressing this major ...
