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An Offer that you Can't Refuse? Agrimafias and Migrant Labor on Vineyards in Southern Italy

In the 2011 post-Arab Spring migration wave, over 64,000 migrants landed on the southern Italian coast, with many of them potentially working illegally on farms through caporalato, a widespread system of illegal recruitment of underpaid farm labor run by Italian agrimafias. To test this hypothesis, this paper evaluates the causal effects of the 2011 migration wave on reported labor productivity focusing ...

Evaluation of Research Careers Fully Acknowledging Open Science Practices

Do Working Hours Affect Health? Evidence from Statutory Workweek Regulations in Germany

This study estimates the causal effect of working hours on health. We deal with the endogeneity of working hours through instrumental variables techniques. In particular, we exploit exogenous variation in working hours from statutory workweek regulations in the German public sector as an instrumental variable. Using panel data, we run two-stage least squares regressions controlling for individual-specific ...

Great Expectations: Reservation Wages and the Minimum Wage Reform

We use the German Socio-Economic Panel to show that introducing a high-impact statutory minimum wage causes an increase in reservation wages of approximately 4 percent at the low end of the distribution. The shifts in reservation wages and observed wages due to the minimum wage reform are comparable in their magnitude. Additional results show that German citizens adjust their reservation wages more ...

The Impact of Minimum Wages on Well-Being: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Germany

To analyze well-being effects of minimum wages, the introduction of a minimum wage in Germany in 2015 is used as a quasi-experiment. Based on the representative SOEP data, a difference-in-differences design compares the development of life, job, and pay satisfaction between those who are affected by the reform according to their pre-intervention wages and those who already have marginally higher wages ...

The effect of exposure to STEM in secondary school on field of study choice

The choice for a field of study has large consequences on later labor market outcomes. However, in absence of liberal arts and sciences bachelors, field of study choice is often made quite early: either in secondary school or at the start of university. A growing literature shows that information about (direct or indirect through exposure) affects students’ field of study choices. We...

Mandatory Day Care for Preschool Children Would Not Be an Effective Solution in Targeting Particular Children

In Germany, around 94 percent of children between the ages of three and six attend a day care center. Regarding the remaining six percent, many experts have speculated that children, primarily those from socio-economically disadvantaged households, do not use day care. Based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the Families in Germany survey (FiD), the present study is one of the first ...

Mandatory day care for preschool children would not be an effective solution in targeting particular children

In Germany, around 94 percent of children between the ages of three and six attend a day care center. Regarding the remaining six percent, many experts have speculated that children, primarily those from socio-economically disadvantaged households, do not use day care. Based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the Families in Germany survey (FiD), the present study is one of the first ...

SOEP mourns loss of former SOEP Director Wolfgang Zapf

Wolfgang Zapf, former SOEP Director and longtime supporter and advocate for the SOEP, passed away in late April at the age of 81. Wolfgang Zapf was instrumental in the founding of the SOEP study in the early 1980s, together with colleagues in the fields of sociology and economics. He has had an enduring influence on the measurement concepts used in the SOEP, and his quality of life concept has become ...

Estimating a Latent Risk Premium in Exchange Rate Futures

Using exchange rates futures instead of forwards completes the maturity spectrum of the correlation between the spot return and the premium. The correlation decreases with increasing maturity, presumably due to a latent risk premium. We hypothesize that the influence of the unobserved risk factor has a contract-specific risk component. Our main contribution is to control for the omitted variable bias ...