External refereed essays

Developing Better Measures of Neighbourhood Characteristics and Change for Use in Studies of Residential Mobility: A Case Study of Britain in the Early 2000s

This paper addresses the problem of measuring neighbourhood characteristics and change when working with individual level datasets to understand the effects of residential mobility. Currently available measures in Britain are in various respects unsuitable for this purpose. The paper explores a new indicator of small area poverty: the Unadjusted Means-tested Benefits Rate (UMBR), which divides claimants ...

A Reputation Economy: How Individual Reward Considerations Trump Systemic Arguments for Open Access to Data

Open access to research data has been described as a driver of innovation and a potential cure for the reproducibility crisis in many academic fields. Against this backdrop, policy makers are increasingly advocating for making research data and supporting material openly available online. Despite its potential to further scientific progress, widespread data sharing in small science is still an ideal ...

The Impact of Wind Power Support Schemes on Technology Choices

In energy systems with large shares of variable renewable energies, electricity generation is lower during unfavorable weather conditions. System-friendly wind turbines (SFTs) rectify this by producing a larger share of their electricity at low wind speeds. This paper analyzes to what extent SFTs' benefits out-weigh their additional costs and how to incentivize investments into them. Using a wind power ...

The Role of Morbidity for Proxy-Reported Well-Being in the Last Year of Life

Late-life well-being often shows steep deteriorations, but the contributing factors are not well understood, in part because data about people’s final year of life are scarce. Here, we draw from and test theoretical perspectives that health-related vulnerabilities undermine the experience and skills older adults typically use to maintain well-being (Charles, 2010). To do so, we examined how various ...

Replikationen, Reputation und gute wissenschaftliche Praxis

In Zeiten wachsender Publikationszahlen und zunehmend datenintensiver Forschung stoßen die klassischen Qualitätssicherungsmaßnahmen, wie die Peer-Review, an ihre Grenzen. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden Replikationsstudien verstärkt als gute wissenschaftliche Praxis und Lösungsansatz diskutiert, um dem Problem methodisch unzureichender und oftmals fehlerbehafteter Analysen zu begegnen. Denn schlechte ...

Pension Incentives and Early Retirement

In this paper we exploit a cohort-specific pension reform to estimate the labour market effects of changes in the financial incentives to retire. In particular, we analyse the effects of the introduction of cohort-specific deductions for early retirement on female retirement, employment and unemployment. For the empirical analysis we use high-quality administrative data from the German pension insurance. ...

Zunehmende Armut in Deutschland: Empirisch gesichertes Faktum oder Mythos?

Trotz bisweilen dramatisierender Berichterstattung verläuft die Armutsquote in Deutschland zwischen 2008 und 2013 weitgehend konstant. Die minimalen Schwankungen, die einige Analysen anzeigen, sind nach statistischen und wissenschaftlichen Kriterien kaum belastbar. Sie beruhen zudem dem umstrittenen Standardindikator zur Messung von Armut. Sie halten einer Überprüfung auf Grundlage alternativer Messarten ...

The Stratifying Role of Job Level for Sickness Absence and the Moderating Role of Gender and Occupational Gender Composition

The study investigates whether sickness absence is stratified by job level - understood as the authority and autonomy a worker holds – beyond the association with education, income, and occupation. A second objective is to establish the moderating role of gender and occupational gender composition on this stratification of sickness absence. Four competing hypotheses are developed that predict different ...

Getting Together: Social Contact Frequency across the Life Span

Frequent social interactions are strongly linked to positive affect, longevity, and good health. Although there has been extensive research on changes in the size of social networks over time, little attention has been given to the development of contact frequency across the life span. In this cohort-sequential longitudinal study, we examined intraindividual changes in the frequency of social contact ...

Crowding in Public Transport: Who Cares and Why?

Crowding on public transport (PT) is a major issue for commuters around the world. Nevertheless, economists have rarely investigated the causes of crowding discomfort. Furthermore, most evidence on the costs of PT crowding is based on trade-offs between crowding, travel time and money. First, this paper assesses discomfort with PT crowding at various density levels across heterogeneous individuals ...

Not Just Any Child Care Center? Social and Ethnic Disparities in the Early Education Institutions with a Beneficial Learning Environment

This study investigates social and ethnic differences in the use of early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers with different learning environments in an ECEC system with universal state-subsidized provision and low fees. Based on the German National Educational Panel Study—Kindergarten Cohort from 2011, we matched data on 587 groups in 253 ECEC centers with information on about 1,700 children ...

Pricing and Capacity Provision in Electricity Markets: An Experimental Study

The creation of adequate investment incentives has been of great concern in the restructuring of the electricity sector. However, to achieve this, regulators have applied different market designs across countries and regions. In this paper we employ laboratory methods to explore the relationship between market design, capacity provision and pricing in electricity markets. Subjects act as firms, choosing ...

Effort-Reward Imbalance at Work and Incident Coronary Heart Disease: A Multi-Cohort Study of 90,164 Individuals

Background: Epidemiologic evidence for work stress as a risk factor for coronary heart disease is mostly based on a single measure of stressful work known as job strain, a combination of high demands and low job control. We examined whether a complementary stress measure that assesses an imbalance between efforts spent at work and rewards received predicted coronary heart disease. Methods: This multi-cohort ...

Moving to a Better Place? Residential Mobility among Families with Young Children in the Millennium Cohort Study

This paper assesses how far residential moves can result in improvement or deterioration of the housing and neighbourhood circumstances for families with young children. It uses data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study concentrating on the time between infancy and age 5, 2001 to 2006. First, we ask which families moved home and in what circumstances. We then examine how moving changed several aspects ...

Revisiting the Evidence for Cardinal Treatment of Ordinal Variables

Well-being (life satisfaction or happiness) is a latent variable that is impossible to observe directly. Moreover, it does not have a unit of measurement. Hence, survey questionnaires usually ask people to rate their well-being in different domains. The common practice of comparing well-being by means of averages or linear regressions ignores the fact that well-being is an ordinal variable. Since data ...

Changes in Life Satisfaction when Losing One's Spouse: Individual Differences in Anticipation, Reaction, Adaptation and Longevity in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Losing a spouse is among the most devastating events that may occur in people's lives. We use longitudinal data from 1,224 participants in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine (a) how life satisfaction changes with the experience of spousal loss; (b) whether socio-demographic factors and social and health resources moderate spousal loss-related changes in life satisfaction; and (c) ...

The Linked Employer–Employee Study of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-LEE): Content, Design and Research Potential

Immer wieder Lohnnebenkosten: Anmerkungen zu deren verschiedenen Rollen

Der Beitrag setzt sich mit der Funktion von Lohnnebenkosten auseinander. Ihre besondere Rolle ist nur polit-ökonomisch erklärbar; (makro-)ökonomisch betrachtet sind sie schlicht und einfach nur ein Teil der Lohnkosten. Arbeitgeber- und Arbeitnehmerbeiträge rechtfertigen, dass beide Seiten in den Selbstverwaltungsgremien der Sozialversicherungen vertreten sind. Hierdurch wird die Stabilität der Sozialversicherungen ...

Distributive and Poverty-Reducing Effects of In-Kind Housing Benefits in Europe: With a Case Study for Germany

While cash housing benefits are generally included in household disposable income, the effect of social housing is not accounted for. This may provide a misleading picture of the impact of overall housing policies on inequality and poverty, as countries use different policies to help households meet their housing expenses. In this article, we present the first comprehensive study of the impact of in-kind ...

Increased Instruction Hours and the Widening Gap in Student Performance

Do increased instruction hours improve the performance of all students? Using PISA scores of students in ninth grade, we analyse the effect of a German education reform that increased weekly instruction hours by two hours (6.5 percent) over almost five years. In the additional time, students are taught new learning content. On average, the reform improves student performance. However, treatment effects ...