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The Minimum Wage in Germany: Institutional Setting and a Systematic Review of Key Findings

The introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015 aimed at improving the welfare of low-wage workers but was also accompanied by concerns about distortions in Europe’s largest economy. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of results from the evaluation of the German minimum wage by compiling recent descriptive evidence and a systematic literature review on causal effects through ...

Participation in German courses and language skills

Is the First Language a Resource, an Obstacle, or Irrelevant for Language Minority Students’ Education?

Successful integration into the education system is of major importance for the future prospects of immigrants and their children as well as for the social cohesion and viability of the receiving societies. Language is generally viewed as an important aspect of this integration. Whereas there is widespread agreement that the language of the residence country (L2) is crucial for students’ educational ...

How Do Immigrant-Origin and Native Voters Consume Political News Media During a National Election Campaign?

This is the first quantitative empirical contribution to examine how immigrant-origin voters use different types of political news media in the course of an election campaign. As this group of voters often has a lower average turnout than natives, it is surprising that we know little about its media usage behaviour. Using novel data from the IMGES II survey conducted during the 2021 German national ...

Detecting Corruption: Evidence from a World Bank project in Kenya

Corruption is a major problem in development aid, in part because areas with the greatest need for development assistance often have weak governance. In these environments, traditional anti-fraud measures such as audits or criminal enforcement are limited in their effectiveness. Moreover, aid organizations face incentives to downplay bad outcomes for fear of alienating donors, which has led to the ...

Backlash or Inclusion? The Political Effects of Co-Ethnic Immigration

Immigration often causes backlash, to the benefit of anti-immigrant parties. Most studies that identify the effect of immigration on native attitudes and behaviors leverage variation in inflows of newcomers who are ethnically distinct from natives. Can we therefore conclude that backlash is the general consequence of exposure to large migration flows? We theorize co-ethnic migrants are not met with ...

Split Questionnaire Designs as a clever way to make surveys shorter

Long questionnaires are a challenge for respondents and researchers alike. Split Questionnaire Designs (SQDs, Raghunathan and Grizzle, 1995) offer a clever way to make surveys shorter: instead of answering every question, respondents receive only parts of the full questionnaire. But how these parts—or “modules”—are constructed makes a difference for data quality. Our study tests strategies to balance ...

The Distribution of National Income in Germany, 1992-2019

This paper analyzes the distribution and composition of pre-tax national income in Germany since 1992, combining personal income tax returns, household survey data, and national accounts. Inequality rose from the 1990s to the late 2000s due to falling labor incomes among the bottom 50% and rising incomes in the top 10%. This trend reversed after 2007 as labor incomes across the bottom 90% increased. ...

The distribution of national income in Germany, 1992–2019

This paper estimates and analyzes the distribution and composition of pre-tax national income in Germany since reunification, combining personal income tax returns, household survey data, and national accounts. We find that pre-tax national income inequality has increased since the 1990s, though to a lesser extent than suggested by previous studies. Our results draw parallels in top income structure ...

Performance Pay and Happiness: Work vs. Home?

Using German survey data, we show conflicting influences of performance pay on overall life satisfaction. The overall influence reflects a strong positive influence through domains of life satisfaction associated with the job (job satisfaction, individual earnings satisfaction and household earning satisfaction) and a strong negative influence through domains away from the job (health satisfaction, ...