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Worst First: Thermal Retrofits, Carbon Prices, and Inequality

The energy price crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the heightened vulnerability of low-income households to rising heating costs, particularly those in energy-inefficient buildings. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this study examines the distributional impact of heating costs across income deciles and evaluates the effectiveness of policy interventions. We ...

Parent-child Mismatches in Educational Aspirations: Prevalence, Stability, and Convergence over time

Life-course scholarship has documented the important role of educational aspirations in status attainment processes but has also revealed that parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations may negatively affect child development. However, it is unclear how parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations evolve over time. Here, we examine (1) the prevalence of mismatching aspirations across ...

System Justification and Democracy: Is Liberal Democracy Part of the Status Quo?

The Generational Gift: The Effects of Grandparental Care on the Next Generations' Health and Well‐Being

Health and well‐being in the family context can be affected by care giving arrangements. Following parental care and daycare, grandparents are the third most important care givers for children in many Western societies. Despite the relevance of grandparental care, there is little evidence on the causal effects of this care mode on the next generations' health and well‐being. In this paper, we fill ...

Child Penalties in Labour Market Skills

This paper estimates child penalties in labour-market-relevant cognitive skills, such as numeracy but also literacy and problem-solving competencies. We use international PIAAC data and adapt a pseudo-panel approach to a single cross-section covering 29 countries. Numeracy scores, which are associated with the largest returns to skills and pronounced gender differences, decline by 0.11 standard deviations ...

Partial Identification of Structural Vector Autoregressions with Non-Centred Stochastic Volatility

We consider structural vector autoregressions that are identified through stochastic volatility under Bayesian estimation. Three contributions emerge from our exercise. First, we show that a non-centred parameterization of stochastic volatility yields a marginal prior for the conditional variances of structural shocks that is centred on homoskedasticity, with strong shrinkage and heavy tails—unlike ...

Linking Social Media News Use, AI Interest, and Political Ideology With AI Subjective Knowledge: A Moderated Mediation Model Across Two Countries

Social media has emerged as a pivotal platform for accessing news content today. While there appears to be a connection between news consumption on social media platforms and perceived knowledge of public affairs, little is known about the potential effect on specific issues like artificial intelligence (AI). To extend findings on people’s perceived knowledge of AI, how it relates to social media news ...

From Concurrent to Push-To-Web Mixed-Mode: Experimental Design Change in the German Social Cohesion Panel

Research shows that concurrent and sequential self-administered mixed-mode designs both have advantages and disadvantages in terms of panel survey recruitment and maintenance. Since concurrent mixed-mode designs usually achieve higher initial response rates at lower bias than sequential mixed-mode designs, the former may be ideal for panel recruitment. However, concurrent designs produced high share ...

One‐Way Versus Two‐Way Postacquisition Integration Efforts: Theory and Evidence

We develop a theory of postacquisition integration that distinguishes between one-way (acquirer-only) and two-way (mutual) effort strategies. We argue that the method of payment—cash versus shares—may serve as an ex ante commitment mechanism to a particular integration strategy, where cash deals align with unilateral effort, and share deals induce mutual engagement. Using transaction-level mergers ...

Personality in the Classroom: Interactions of Parental SES and Students’ Big Five in Predicting School Performance

While socioeconomic status (SES) and personality have both been identified as relevant predictors of academic achievement, little is known about their possible interplay in predicting school performance. The present study used the latent moderated structural equations (LMS) method to investigate latent interactions between familial SES and parent-rated Big Five in a sample of German high school students ...