External refereed essays

Institutional Coordination Arrangements as Elements of Policy Design Spaces: Insights from Climate Policy

This study offers insights into the institutional arrangements established to coordinate policies aiming at the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Drawing on the literature on policy design, we highlight institutional arrangements as elements of policy design spaces and contend that they fall into four categories that either stress the political or problem orientation of this activity: ...

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares ...

Parental Leave Policy and Long-run Earnings of Mothers

Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women’s employment rates but to decrease their wages in case of extended leave duration. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers’ long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested ...

Grenzen und Fortschritte indikatorengestützter Politik am Beispiel der Corona-Pandemie: Heinz-Grohmann-Vorlesung 2020/21

Indikatoren sollen der Steuerung von (sozialen) Prozessen dienen. Sie beschreiben jedoch die Realität in der Regel nur deskriptiv und unvermeidlich mit mehr oder weniger großen und systematischen Messfehlern behaftet. Insofern ist es im Allgemeinen alles andere als einfach mit Hilfe von Indikatoren zu steuern; insbesondere dann, wenn für Problembereiche (fehlerbehaftete) Zielwerte vorgegeben werden, ...

An Alternative Bootstrap for Proxy Vector Autoregressions

We propose a new bootstrap algorithm for inference for impulse responses in structural vector autoregressive models identified with an external proxy variable. Simulations show that the new bootstrap algorithm provides confidence intervals for impulse responses which often have more precise coverage than and similar length to the competing moving-block bootstrap intervals. An empirical example shows ...

Input-Output-Beziehungen für einen Stadtstaat: die Freie und Hansastadt Hamburg als Beispiel

Nationally Representative Results on SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence and Testing in Germany at the End of 2020

Pre-vaccine SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence data from Germany are scarce outside hotspots, and socioeconomic disparities remained largely unexplored. The nationwide representative RKI-SOEP study (15,122 participants, 18–99 years, 54% women) investigated seroprevalence and testing in a supplementary wave of the Socio-Economic-Panel conducted predominantly in October–November 2020. Self-collected oral-nasal ...

Factors Affecting Rental Prices in the Russian Empire

In this study, we investigate the determinants of rental prices in Russian Empire prior to World War I and the variation of housing rents across cities. For our research, we use statistical data on 1232 cities in 1910. Our analysis shows that the urban rents in imperial Russia were affected by such city characteristics as its population structure, prices for different goods, and the geographical position. ...

The Hidden Homeownership Welfare State: An International Long-term Perspective on the Tax Treatment of Homeowners

Welfare is traditionally understood as social security decommodifying labour markets or as social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this article introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1901 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of ...

Foreign Exchange Intervention: A New Database

We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. This new dataset allows us to document stylized facts about the use of foreign exchange interventions for countries that ...

Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions ...

Culture, Children and Couple Gender Inequality

This paper examines how culture impacts within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting thesetting of Germany’s division and reunification, I compare child penalties of East Germans whowere socialised in a more gender egalitarian culture to West Germans socialised in a gendertraditionalculture. Using a household panel, I show that the long-run child penalty on thefemale income share is 23.9 percentage ...

Today’s Older Adults Are Cognitively Fitter Than Older Adults Were 20 Years Ago, but When and How They Decline Is No Different Than in the Past

History-graded increases in older adults’ levels of cognitive performance are well documented, but little is known about historical shifts in within-person change: cognitive decline and onset of decline. We combined harmonized perceptual motor speed data from independent samples recruited in 1990 and 2010 to obtain 2,008 age-matched longitudinal observations (M = 78 years, 50% women) from 228 participants ...

Carbon Leakage, Consumption, and Trade

We review the state of knowledge concerning international CO2 emission transfers associated particularly with trade in energy-intensive goods and concerns about carbon leakage arising from climate policies. The historical increase in aggregate emission transfers from developing to developed countries peaked around 2006 and declined since. Studies find no evidence that climate policies lead to carbon ...

The Effects of an Increase in the Retirement Age on Health Care Costs: Evidence from Administrative Data

In this paper, we use unique health record data that cover outpatient care and the associated costs to quantify the health care costs of a sizable increase in the retirement age in Germany. For the identification, we exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform which abolished an early retirement program for all women born after 1951. Our results show that health care costs significantly increase ...

Mexico's Energy Prospects: Gains from Renewable Sources Over A Fossil Fuel-Dominated Environment

Changing political conditions in Mexico threatens the future of clean energy inthe country. A competitive electricity market and ambitious environmental goalswere among the priorities of the previous administration, but the current administrationaims to increase revenues from the national power company and acquirecontrol of the electricity market at the expense of consumer welfare and the environment.In ...

Income and Wealth Inequality in Hong Kong, 1981–2020: The Rise of Pluto-Communism?

The objective of this paper is to better understand the evolution and institutional roots of Hong Kong's growing economic inequality and political cleavages. By combining multiple sources of data (household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings, national accounts) and methodological innovations, two main findings are obtained. First, he evidence suggests a very large rise in income and wealth inequality ...

Using Blood Test Parameters to Define Biological Age among Older Adults: Association with Morbidity and Mortality Independent of Chronological Age Validated in Two Separate Birth Cohorts

Biomarkers defining biological age are typically laborious or expensive to assess. Instead, in the current study, we identified parameters based on standard laboratory blood tests across metabolic, cardiovascular, inflammatory, and kidney functioning that had been assessed in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE) (n = 384) and Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) (n = 1517). We calculated biological age using those ...

Attitudes Toward Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination in Germany: A Representative Analysis of Data from the Socio-economic Panel for the Year 2021

Adequate immunity to COVID-19 apparently cannot be attained in Germany by voluntary vaccination alone, and therefore the introduction of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination is still under consideration. We present findings on the potential acceptance of such a requirement by the German population, and we report on the reasons given for accepting or rejecting it and how these reasons vary according to population ...

Income Growth in the United Kingdom during Late Career and after Retirement: Growing Inequalities after Deindustrialisation, Educational Expansion and Development of the Knowledge-based Economy

This article shows how late-life incomes from work and pensions evolved in the United Kingdom between 1991 and 2007, the year the Great Recession began. Our main contribution comes from focusing on changes across cohorts in different educational groups while also considering the gender divide. Our statistical analyses based on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) suggest that deindustrialisation, ...