Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Estimating and Explaining the Prevalence of Tuberculosis for Asylum Seekers Upon Their Arrival in Germany

Up until recently incidences of tuberculosis (TB) had been declining for many years in Germany. The rise in TB cases coincided with a large increase in the number of people applying for asylum. We combine data from various sources to estimate the at-entry prevalence of TB for asylum seekers from 18 countries of origin and rely on survey data to explain the varying risk of suffering from TB. Our results ...

Three Essays in Experimental Economics

Behavioral economics evolves around the psychological underpinnings of economic decision-making. Over the last decades, it has become an established field of economics and has shed new light on our understanding of important economic questions. Many empirical evidences that contribute to the advancement of the behavioral approach are established with data from experiments, either in the lab or in the ...

Intertemporal Choices of Children and Adults from Poor Roma Communities: A Case Study from Slovakia

Poverty may have negative consequences on people's economic behavior and literature has documented close links between time discounting and poverty. This paper investigates intertemporal choices made by children and adults from segregated Roma communities in Slovakia. The study finds that fewer children than adults prefer smaller-sooner to larger-later amounts (referred to as "quasi-impatience"). ...

Integrating Refugees and Asylum Seekers into the German Economy and Society: Empirical Evidence and Policy Objectives

Essays on Methods for Causal Inference

This dissertation consists of three papers sharing the objective to analyze how machine learning methods can be useful to economists and econometricians in their pursuit to understand causal mechanisms operating in the economy. Such causal knowledge is essential when designing policies that help achieve societal goals. ML techniques are increasingly applied in and adapted to practical policy settings. ...

Quantifying the Economic, Linguistic, and Social Benefits for Refugees Participating in a Federal German Integration Course

In 2005, the German government introduced various integration courses in order to better support migrants and refugees. Since 2010, the refugee population in Germany has exponentially increased, particularly after Chancellor Merkel’s 2015 decision to admit more than one million refugees. This study evaluates the efficacy of these integration courses by examining the extent to which participation in ...

Mental Health over the Life Course: Evidence for a U-Shape?

We aim to identify the age-profile of mental health while introducing minimal bias to reach identification. Using mental health data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we apply first difference estimation to derive an unbiased estimate of the second derivative of the age effect as well as an estimate up to a linear period trend of the first derivative. Next, we use a battery of estimators ...

Education as a Positional Good? Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

People care about their relative standing in society and therefore compare themselves to relevant others. Empirical findings suggest that there are concerns for relative standing for different goods and life domains such as income, cars, attractiveness, and supervisor’s praise. Even education has been mentioned as having a (partially) positional character. However, there has been only small consideration ...

Refugees’ Mental Health during the Coronavirus Pandemic: Psychological Distress and Continued Loneliness

Many people are suffering from the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Refugees, however, belong to one of the underpriviliged groups in many areas of society. They are more likely than average to live in overcrowded living quarters such as community housing and are thus exposed to a higher risk of infection. At the same time, even before the pandemic, they were more likely than average to experience ...

Are temporary jobs stepping stones or dead ends? A systematic review of the literature

We present a meta-analysis on the debate about the "stepping stone vs. dead end" hypothesis related to the causal effect of temporary jobs on future labour market performances. We select academic papers published on international peer-reviewed journals from 1990 until 2021. Among 78 observations from 64 articles, 32% support the hypothesis according to which temporary contracts are a port ...