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The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany

Despite the prevalence of government surveillance systems around the world, causal evidence on their social and economic consequences is lacking. Using county-level variation in the number of Stasi informers within Socialist East Germany during the 1980s and accounting for potential endogeneity, we show that more intense regional surveillance led to lower levels of trust and reduced social activity ...

Who Buffers Income Losses after Job Displacement? The Role of Alternative Income Sources, the Family, and the State

Using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) this paper analyses to what extent alternative income sources, reactions within the household context, and redistribution by the state attenuate earnings losses after job displacement. Applying propensity score matching and fixed effects estimations, we find high individual earnings losses after job displacement and only limited convergence. ...

Subdued Global Growth, Restrained European Expansion

Losing Work, Moving away? Regional Mobility after Job Loss

Using German survey data, we investigate the relationship between involuntary job loss and regional mobility. Our results show that job loss has a strong positive effect on the propensity to relocate. We also analyze whether the high and persistent earnings losses of displaced workers can in part be explained by limited regional mobility. Applying an event study approach, which controls for worker ...

Children and adolescents with refugee background less likely to participate in voluntary educational programs - with exception of extracurricular school activities

Non-compulsory educational programs including extracurricular school activities, child day care centers, and non-formal educational programs, such as sports or music activities outside of school, make an important contribution to social integration. But to what extent do children and their families actually make use of these voluntary programs? On the basis of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the ...

Refugees entered the labor market later than other migrants

It has taken longer for refugees who have been living in Germany for some time, particularly those who arrived between 1990 and 2010, to take up gainful employment than other migrants. These findings are based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample. In addition, these refugees show a higher rate of unemployment and earn lower incomes by comparison even years ...

Half of the refugees in Germany found their Ffirst job through social contacts

In Germany, the majority of people tend to find work through friends, acquaintances, and relatives when they first enter the labor market or switch jobs. The same applies to immigrants and their offspring. Integrating refugees into the labor market is considered crucial to their overall integration into society, yet little is known about how they land their first jobs. The present paper attempts to ...

Classification Trees and Heterogeneous Moment-Based Models

BAMS is a joint seminar by the DIW Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance, the HU Berlin and the WZB.

Stationary Changes in Long-Run Energy Commodity Prices

Situated at the intersection of the literatures on speculative storage and non-renewable commodity scarcity, this paper considers whether changes in persistence have occurred in long-run U.S. prices of the energy commodities crude oil, natural gas and bituminous coal. We allow for a structural break when testing for a break in persistence to avoid a change in the stochastic properties of prices being ...

Personality Development in Old Age Relates to Physical Health and Cognitive Performance: Evidence from the Berlin Aging Study II

We examine how late-life personality development relates to overall morbidity as well as specific performance-based indicators of physical and cognitive functioning in 1,232 older adults in the Berlin Aging Study II (aged 65-88 years). Latent growth models indicated that, on average, neuroticism and conscientiousness decline over time, whereas extraversion and openness increase and agreeableness remains ...