Life Course and Inequality Research Group
Events

The biological trace of public health policies: how Medicaid improved epigenetic aging in adolescence

Public health insurance for U.S. children has expanded dramatically through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), yet the biological mechanisms linking these policies to long-run health remain poorly understood. We test whether childhood eligibility for Medicaid/CHIP causally affects epigenetic aging measures. Using longitudinal epigenetic data from the Fragile Families and...

Union Responses to Revenue Shocks: Evidence from Right-to-Work Laws in the US

Unions decide how to allocate their resources to organise new workers and to benefit existing members. While there is a growing literature studying the aggregate effects of shocks to union power, little is known about how individual unions change their behaviour in response to these shocks. We illustrate the importance of accounting for union equilibrium responses when studying the impact of...

Methodological Challenges in Cross-Cohort Comparisons of Educational Achievement

Comparisons of educational achievement across cohorts are frequently used to examine changes in educational performance and to evaluate the impact of societal or educational events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, drawing causal inferences from observational data without strong experimental control remains challenging, as often no single clear methodological approach is universally...

Measuring Ambiguity Attitudes Reliably in Surveys

This seminar introduces ambiguity, explains why it matters in economics, and discusses how ambiguity attitudes are typically measured in empirical research. Ambiguity plays an important role in decision-making, as most situations in life involve unknown outcomes or probabilities. However, people’s attitudes toward ambiguity are hard to measure precisely, as standard measures based on incentivized...

Measurement error models on anonymized georeferenced data

Georeferenced data are often anonymized for data protection reasons. This is done either by aggregating the data into larger spatial units (e.g., higher-level administrative units or grids with larger cell sizes) or by using stochastic methods to deliberately overlay the original coordinates. These methods significantly distort the data and associated variables, making further modeling steps...

Public Sector Relocation and Regional Development in Germany

As regional economic disparities within countries grow, governments are increasingly experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy. In this paper, I estimate the causal effect on local labor markets of a German policy that relocated about 3,000 public sector jobs to lagging regions. Using novel data on 60 agency relocations from 2015–2025, I estimate employment and...

Stress and Resilience in the Labor Market

Diversity in Teams and Creative Output

Modern labor markets increasingly rely on teamwork for tasks that require creative thinking, yet little is known about how such creative output is produced. We exploit the randomized allocation of first-year undergraduate students to study groups in a large Economics module to examine how diversity in team members’ backgrounds affects the creativity of their collaborative work. Each group produces...

The trickle-down effects of higher education affirmative action

Occupations, Disability Insurance, and Career Choices

Work-limiting disabilities pose a significant risk to the earnings potential and welfare of older workers. While coverage of public disability insurance (DI) systems is almost universal, the risk of becoming dependent on DI varies across occupations. In this paper, I study the value of public DI across different occupations using data from administrative social security records in Germany. I...

Improving Migration Outcomes: A Mentoring Experiment and its Network Effects in Senegal (with Bernd Beber, Zara Riaz, and Juni Singh)

In this paper we study the effectiveness of a randomized migration mentoring program, and the role of network embeddedness at origin, for migration decisions and outcomes in rural Senegal. The mentoring program improves job expectations when migrating, migration experiences, and economic outcomes. When the mentoring is attended by randomly assigned migrant from the origin village, positive...

A missed opportunity? Labor demand shocks and workforce diversity

We study how labor demand shocks affect workforce diversity in the absence of targeted diversity policies. Exploiting German reunification as a natural experiment, we analyze the academic labor market where nearly all social sciences professors in East Germany were replaced while STEM faculty remained largely unchanged. Using administrative data and a regional difference-in-differences design, we...

Raising the Retirement Age for Women. Spillover Effects on Young Adults’ Labor Supply in Brazil**CANCELLED**

CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS Latin America is facing rapid population aging. To address the sustainability of contributory pension systems, many countries are considering increasing the retirement age. One such case is Brazil, where a pension reform in 2019 raised the retirement age from 60 to 62 for women. While the effects of such reforms on the labor force participation of older adults and their...

The Effect of Public Sector Relocations on Regional Development in Germany

Regional economic disparities within countries have become increasingly large, often surpassing the disparities observed between countries. To address regional inequality, governments have been turning away from standard subsidies and are experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy. This paper estimates the causal effect of public employment reallocation on local...

Firm Adjustment to a Policy-Induced Negative Labor Supply Shock: Evidence from Germany

With Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Jan Nimczik and Lennert Peede In times of an increasing scarcity of workers, Germany has in a rare move decreased the retirement age for a sizeable group of the workforce. This paper investigates the effect of this negative labor supply shock on firm and individual level outcomes using the universe of firms in the IEB as well as matched employer-employee data from...

Conditional Permanent Residency and Refugee Integration: Evidence from Germany's 2016 Reform

This study examines the 2016 reform of Germany's Residence Act that intended to foster refugee integration by extending the waiting period for permanent residency from three to five years and introducing requirements, such as proficiency in German and partial financial independence. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we employ a difference-in-differences design to analyse...

Part-time Traps (joint with Jan Berendsen, Iris Kesternich and Christian Pugnaghi Zimpelmann)

Most women reduce their labor supply after childbirth. When children become older, most women spend less time on women spend less time on childcare activities. Yet, female labor supply recovers little as children age and part-time work remains common among mothers of older children. Understanding the motivation behind labor supply choices of women with older children is crucial to design effective...

Unequal Estate Division for Wealth Perpetuation: Portfolios, Primogeniture, and Patrilineality (with Daria Tisch and Manuel Schechtl)

While inequalities in inter-vivos gifts and bequests between families are widely recognized as key drivers of wealth inequality, less is known about the unequal transmission of wealth within families. This study addresses this gap by asking: (1) To what extent are estates unequally divided? (2) How do estate portfolios, primogeniture, and patrilineality shape unequal estate division? (3) What is...

Inventors‘ Personal Experience of Natural Disasters and Green Innovation

We show that personal experiences affect high-stakes economic decisions among inventors. Using matched patent and survey data from French and German inventors linked to natural disaster records, we exploit exogenous variation in disaster exposure. Inventors personally affected by natural disasters subsequently produce 8.2 percent more green patents, primarily driven by emission-reducing mitigation...

In the Shadow of Brothers: Unintended Impacts of a School Entry Policy on Migrant Girls

Siblings are the ultimate peers, deeply shaping one another’s development. Do these influences vary with a family’s cultural background? I estimate how sibling spillovers differ for girls and boys with older brothers or sisters in migrant and native families, using a regression discontinuity design on high-quality administrative data. Exploiting exogenous variation in older siblings’ achievement...