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Essays on Career Choice under Risk and Ambiguity

Helping with the Kids? How Family-Friendly Workplaces Affect Parental Well-Being and Behaviour

Despite political efforts, balancing work and family life is still challenging. This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of firm level interventions that seek to reduce the work–life conflict. The focus is on how childcare support affects the well-being, working time, and caring behaviour of mothers with young children. Since the mid-2000s and pushed by public policies, in Germany an increasing ...

Housing Expenditures and Income Inequality

In this paper, we show that, in terms of real disposable income, changes in housing expenditures dramatically exacerbate the trend of income inequality that has risen sharply in Germany since the mid-1990s. More specifically, whereas the 50/10 ratio of net household income increasesby 22 percentage points (pp) between 1993 and 2013, it increases by 62 pp for income net of housing expenditures. At the ...

Growing up in Ethnic Enclaves: Language Proficiency and Educational Attainment of Immigrant Children

Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children’s acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in a model with region and ethnicity fixed effects. Our results indicate that exposure to a higher own-ethnic ...

Different Strokes for Different Folks: Entrepreneurs' Job Satisfaction and the Intersection of Gender and Migration Background

Migrant enterprises comprise about 10% of all enterprises in Germany and are therefore a crucial part of the German economy and its entrepreneurial ecosystems. Relatedly, migrant entrepreneurship is a highly recognized topic within political discussions as well as within entrepreneurship research. While there is already an impressive body of work regarding the nature and quality of migrant enterprises, ...

Prediction Based on Entrepreneurship-Prone Personality Profiles: Sometimes Worse Than the Toss of a Coin

The human personality predicts a wide range of activities and occupational choices—from musical sophistication to entrepreneurial careers. However, which method should be applied if information on personality traits is used for prediction and advice? In psychological research, group profiles are widely employed. In this contribution, we examine the performance of profiles using the example of career ...

Home Ownership and Monetary Policy Transmission

We present empirical evidence on the heterogeneity in monetary policy transmission across countries with different home ownership rates. We use household-level data together with shocks to the policy rate identified from high-frequency data. We find that housing tenure reacts more strongly to unexpected changes in the policy rate in Germany and Switzerland –the OECD countries with the lowest home ownership ...

University Tuition Fees and High School Students’ Educational Intentions

This paper studies whether higher education tuition fees influence the intention to acquire a university degree among high school students and, if so, whether the effect on individuals from low-income households is particularly strong. We analyze the introduction and subsequent elimination of university tuition fees in Germany across states and over time in a difference-in-differences setting. Using data ...

Where Does the Fairtrade Money Go? How Much Consumers Pay Extra for Fairtrade Coffee and How This Value Is Split along the Value Chain

Fairtrade certification aims at transferring wealth from the consumer to the farmer; however, coffee passes through many hands before reaching final consumers. Bringing together retail, wholesale, and stock market data, this study estimates how much more consumers are paying for Fairtrade-certified coffee in US supermarkets and finds estimates around $1 per lb. I then assess how this price premium ...

Understanding the Great Recession

We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions. We reach this conclusion by looking through the lens of an estimated New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate degrees of price rigidities, no nominal rigidities in wages, and a binding zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate. Our model does ...