External refereed essays

Avoid, Shift or Improve Passenger Transport? Impacts on the Energy System

Agglomeration Economies: Different Effects on TFP in High-tech and Low-tech Industries

We study the impact of agglomeration effects on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) for industry groups defined by technology intensity. This allows for non-uniform effects on firms depending on their technological level. We find that urban economies have the largest impact on firm productivity in high-technology industries, while they have no effectin low-technology industries. For firms in the ...

Is Interest Rate Hiking a Recipe for Missing Several Goals of Monetary Policy—Beating Inflation, Preserving Financial Stability, and Keeping up Output Growth?

levelsof all goods in the US and Europe rose surprisingly quickly and persistently. TheFED began in March 2022 and the ECB in July 2022 with historically unique interestrate increases to combat the wage-price spiral that had not yet begun. In this article weshow that energy, commodities and food were the main drivers of inflation. For this reason,central banks’ goal of weakening demand for labor through ...

Airbnb and Rental Markets: Evidence from Berlin

Foreign Debt, Capital Controls, and Secondary Markets: Theory and Evidence from Nazi Germany

We investigate how internal distribution motives can affect the implementation of an important macroeconomic policy: capital controls. To do this, we study one of history’s largest debt repatriations, which took place under strict capital controls in 1930s Germany, providing a wealth of quantitative and historical evidence. We show that the authorities kept private repatriations under strict control, ...

The Long-term Consequences of Early School Absences for Educational Attainment and Labour Market Outcomes

School absences can negatively impact a child's schooling, including the loss of teacher-led lessons, peer interactions, and, ultimately, academic achievement. However, little is known about the long-term consequences of school absences for overall educational attainment and labour market outcomes. In this paper, we used data from the 1970 British Cohort Study to examine long-term associations between ...

Establishing a Probability Sample in a Crisis Context: The Example of Ukrainian Refugees in Germany in 2022

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, more than one million refugees have arrived in Germany. These Ukrainian refugees differ in many aspects from Germany’s past forced migration experiences and there exists an urgent need for sound data and information for politics, practitioners, and academics. In response, the IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP study was established to provide high-quality ...

Exploring the Interdependence of Climate, Finance, Energy, and Geopolitics: A Conceptual Framework for Systemic Risks Amidst Multiple Crises

Navigating the transition toward a zero-emission and just future amidst multiple crises requires a nuanced understanding of potential hindrances to investments and energy transitions. As current approaches hardly consider the big picture of interacting crises, this study offers a framework to analyze the dynamics and risk channels between 1) the climate crisis, 2) financial (in)stability, 3) the geopolitical ...

Certification against Greenwashing in Nascent Bond Markets: Lessons from African ESG Bonds

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change. Climate and sustainability-linked bonds can provide funding to African governments and corporations for projects that help to mitigate climate change, combat biodiversity loss, and foster sustainable development. However, less than 0.3% of the global environmental, social, governance (ESG) bond issuance volume is devoted to projects ...

Teleworking and Life Satisfaction during COVID-19: The Importance of Family Structure

We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This average effect hides considerable heterogeneity, reflecting gender-role asymmetries: lower life satisfaction is found only for unmarried ...

Life Events and Life Satisfaction: Estimating Effects of Multiple Life Events in Combined Models

How do life events affect life satisfaction? Previous studies focused on a single event or separate analyses of several events. However, life events are often grouped non-randomly over the lifespan, occur in close succession, and are causally linked, raising the question of how to best analyze them jointly. Here, we used representative German data (SOEP; N = 40,121individuals; n = 41,402 event occurrences) ...

Housing and Health: A Multidimensional, Qualitative Analysis of the Experiences of Asylum Seekers and Refugees Living in German Reception Centres

Objectives Housing is an important social determinant of health, but the perspectives of asylum seekers and refugees (ASR) in large, centralised reception centres remain under-researched. We therefore sought to examine which housing aspects in reception centres are deemed relevant for health by ASR in Germany.MethodsBased on 47 interviews with 42 ASR in Germany originating from three different studies, ...

Exploring Contextual Effects of Post-migration Housing Environment on Mental Health of Asylum Seekers and Refugees: A Crosssectional, Population-Based, Multi-Level Analysis in a German Federal State

Asylum seekers and refugees (ASR) in Germany are dispersed quasi-randomly to state provided,collective accommodation centres. We aimed to analyse contextual effects of post-migration housing environment on their mental health. We drew a balanced random sample of 54 from 1 938 accommodation centres with 70 634 ASR in Germany’s 3rd largest federal state. Individual-level data on depression and anxiety ...

Heteroskedastic Proxy Vector Autoregressions: An Identification-Robust Test for Time-Varying Impulse Responses in the Presence of Multiple Proxies

We propose a test for time-varying impulse responses in heteroskedastic structural vector autoregressions that can be used when the shocks are identified by external proxy variables as a group but not necessarily individually. The test is robust to the identification scheme for identifying the shocks individually and can be used even if the shocks are not identified individually. The asymptotic analysis ...

Fortschritte bei Frauen in Führungspositionen – doch weitere Anstrengungen nötig

Women’s representation on corporate boards of German companies increased again in 2023. In the largest 200 firms, 18 % of executive board members and 32 % of supervisory board members were women. However, in most companies, there is at most one woman on the executive board and the share of women among CEOs has decreased in many places. Companies, policymakers and other stakeholders must make greater ...

Rent Control Effects through the Lens of Empirical Research: An Almost Complete Review of the Literature

Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? ...

Education and Pandemic SARS-CoV-2 Infections in the German Working Population: The Mediating Role of Working from Home

Objectives SARS-CoV-2 infections were unequally distributed during the pandemic, with those in disadvantaged socioeconomic positions being at higher risk. Little is known about the underlying mechanism of this association. This study assessed to what extent educational differences in SARS-CoV-2 infections were mediated by working from home.Methods We used data of the German working population derived ...

Working Memory and Fluid Intelligence Are Differentially Related to Categories of Urban Fabric in Older Adults: Results from the Berlin Aging Study

Urbanization is Globally increasing at a rapid rate but its consequences for mental health, including cognitivefunctioning, are not well understood. In particular, little is known about the effects of different morphologicalfeatures associated with urban development, such as variations in the densities of urban fabric (i.e., degrees ofground sealing). We investigated associations of episodic memory, ...

Change in Personal Culture over the Life Course

Prior literature finds stability in personal culture, such as attitudes and values, in individuals’ life courses using short-running panel data. This work has concluded that lasting change in personal culture is rare after formative early years. This conclusion conflicts with a growing body of evidence for changes in personal culture after significant life course transitions, drawing on long-running ...

Sexual Jokes and Conversations at the Workplace and Their Relation to Employee Well-Being: Results from a Longitudinal Study

Ambient social sexual behaviour at work refers to sexual jokes and conversations at the workplace. Prior cross-sectional studies indicate that this behaviour is relatively widespread and tends to be associated with negative well-being. We revisit this research by investigating the outcomes of sexual jokes and conversations at work after 1 year in a comparatively large employee sample. The perceived ...