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Does Schooling Affect Health Behavior? Evidence from the Educational Expansion in Western Germany

During the postwar period German states pursued policies to increase the share of young Germans obtaining a university entrance diploma (Abitur) by building more academic track schools, but the timing of educational expansion differed between states. This creates exogenous variation in the availability of higher education, which allows estimating the causal effect of education on health behaviors. ...

Essays on variable risk attitudes

Do Firms Obey the Law When They Fire Workers? Social Criteria and Severance Payments in Germany

Purpose – Employment protection legislation defines social criteria according to which firms can dismiss workers. If firms evade the law, then negotiation about compensation begins. To reduce the legal and financial uncertainty often associated with ex post bargaining, the German government stipulate severance payments in the case of mutual agreements in law in 2004. This paper aims to examine whether ...

Don’t worry, be flexible? Job satisfaction among flexible workers

This paper investigates whether workers in flexible employment relationships show lower job satisfaction than workers with permanent job contracts. Our results show that looking only at the formal job security provided by the contract may lead to misleading conclusions about job satisfaction. We find, using longitudinal data for Germany, that it is not the formal job security provided by the contractual ...

Labour market integration of refugee’s in Germany: Is there evidence for a refugee gap?

In this thesis, I examine the existence of a refugee gap in Germany. In more detail, I research the differences in net income and employment rate for immigrants with different motives for migration. In order to do that I use data from the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample which is a joint project from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute for ...

A Joint Hazard-Longitudinal Model of the Timing of Migration, Immigrant Quality, and Labor Market Assimilation

This paper develops and estimates a joint hazard-longitudinal (JHL) model of the timing of migration and labor market assimilation – two processes that have been assumed to be independent in the existing literature. The JHL model accounts for the endogenous age of entry in estimating the returns to years since migration by allowing cross-equation correlations of random intercepts with individual rates ...

Limits to Wage Growth: Understanding the Wage Divergence between Immigrants and Natives

This study finds evidence of wage divergence between immigrants and natives in Germany using a country-wide household panel from 1984 to 2014. We incorporate the possibility of wage divergence into a two-period model of economic assimilation by modeling the differences in the efficiency of human capital production and prices per unit of human capital between immigrants and natives. Individual rates ...

The double role of ethnic heterogeneity in explaining welfare-state generosity

Based on theoretical models of budget-balanced social insurance and individual choice, we argue that in addition to the well-known empathy mechanism whereby ethnic heterogeneity undermines sentiments of solidarity among a citizenry to reduce welfare generosity, population heterogeneity affects the generosity of a polity’s social insurance programs through another distinct mechanism, political conflict. ...

Income Mobility

We survey the literature on income mobility, aiming to provide an integrated discussion of mobility within- and between-generations. We review mobility concepts, descriptive devices, measurement methods, data sources, and recent empirical evidence.

Estimating labour supply elasticities based on cross-country micro data: A bridge between micro and macro estimates?

The Nordic model relies on high tax rates to finance an extensive welfare state. If labour supply elasticities are large, the burden of financing the model can be large even if, arguably, the practice of providing subsidised goods that support labour supply is likely to mitigate these effects. We utilise repeated cross sections of micro data from several countries, including the four major Nordic countries, ...