Publikationsliste KOPS

We use detailed administrative data to study the adjustment of local labor markets to industrial robots in Germany. Robot exposure, as predicted by a shift-share variable, is associated with displacement effects in manufacturing, but those are fully offset by new jobs in services. The incidence mostly falls on young workers just entering the labor force. Automation is related to more stable employment within firms for incumbents, and this is driven by workers taking over new tasks in their original plants. Several measures indicate that those new jobs are of higher quality than the previous ones. Young workers also adapt their educational choices, and substitute away from vocational training towards colleges and universities. Finally, industrial robots have benefited workers in occupations with complementary tasks, such as managers or technical scientists.

We study the optimal design of student financial aid as a function of parental income. We derive optimal financial aid formulas in a general model. We estimate a model of selection into college for the United States that comprises multidimensional heterogeneity, endogenous parental transfers, dropout, labor supply in college, and uncertain returns. We quantify optimal financial aid in the estimated model and find it is strongly declining in parental income even without distributional concerns. Equity and efficiency go hand in hand.

Several special questioning techniques have been developed in order to counteract misreporting to sensitive survey questions, for example, on criminal behavior. However, doubts have been raised concerning their validity and practical value as well as the strategy of testing their validity using the “more-is-better” assumption in comparative survey experiments. This is because such techniques can be prone to generating false positive estimates, that is, counting “innocent” respondents as “guilty” ones. This article investigates the occurrence of false positive estimates by comparing direct questioning, the crosswise model (CM), and the item count technique (ICT). We analyze data from two online surveys (N = 2,607 and 3,203) carried out in Germany and Switzerland. Respondents answered three questions regarding traits for which it is known that their prevalence in reality is zero. The results show that CM suffers more from false positive estimates than ICT. CM estimates amount to up to 15 percent for a given true value of zero. The mean of the ICT estimates is not significantly different from zero. We further examine factors causing the biased estimates of CM and show that speeding through the questionnaire (random answering) and problems with the measurement procedure—namely regarding the unrelated questions—are responsible. Our findings suggest that CM is problematic and should not be used or evaluated without the possibility of accounting for false positives. For ICT, the issue is less severe.

Do male‐biased labour demand shocks affect women's labour market outcomes? To study this question, we examine large oil field discoveries in the southern USA from 1900 to 1940. We find that oil wealth has an overall positive effect on female labour force participation that is driven by single women. While oil discoveries increase demand for male labour and raise male wages, they do not drive women out of the tradable goods sector or the labour force. Our findings suggest that the absence of any crowding out effects of oil wealth can be explained by compensating forces such as demand effects within the tradable sector, or by income effects that lead to growth in the non‐tradable sector.

This paper studies how tax evasion in the self-employment sector affects aggregate outcomes and welfare. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete markets in which heterogeneous agents choose between being a worker or self-employed. Self-employed agents may misreport their business income but face the risk of being detected by the tax authorities. Our model replicates important quantitative features of the U.S. economy in terms of income, wealth, self-employment, and misreporting. Tax evasion alleviates credit constraints and leads to a larger self-employment sector but reduces the average size and productivity of self-employed businesses. Tax evasion generates positive welfare effects for the self-employed at the expense of the workers.

What do you do when your field research is called off? The original plan for political scientist Fabian Bergmann was to travel to Norway and Sweden to do research for his doctoral thesis on the indigenous Sámi people. Then the coronavirus hit. Now the project faces the challenge of making contacts at a distance.

The number of immigrants worldwide has grown rapidly in recent years, and their integration poses challenges, such as cultural and language barriers, for organizations and societies. Securing and maintaining employment is a key challenge for immigrants, yet management research has devoted little attention to migration. We aim to contribute to the emerging literature on this topic by utilizing a multistudy approach with objective and time-lagged field data from 14,327 mail carriers nested in 737 units of a large Swiss logistics firm and an experimental audio vignette study with 262 participants from the United Kingdom. We investigate whether (in)congruence in terms of immigration background between employees and customers is linked to customer complaints. Controlling for service quality, we find that both congruence scenarios (both or neither migrants) are associated with fewer complaints, the latter suggesting that migrants identify with each other despite national and cultural differences. Results from the two incongruence scenarios show increased complaints. In Study 1, we find that units that receive more complaints experience higher rates of voluntary employee withdrawal behaviors (short-term absenteeism and voluntary turnover), highlighting how unfair customer complaints can hurt organizations twice, by increasing the risk of loss in both customers and employees. In Study 2, we replicate the immigrant identity effect at the individual level and find that social attraction mediates the (in)congruence–complaints link.

Most interdisciplinary analyses intuitively depict the judiciary as an actor promoting post- or transnational conceptions of membership and equality in contemporary debates about citizenship and immigration. A qualitative survey of prominent judgments of two powerful supranational tribunals on five central themes identifies an intriguing twist in the case law. Over the past decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg have frequently emphasised social affiliation with the host society, thereby cautiously embracing moderately communitarian narratives of membership, which tempered the traditional emphasis of both courts on equal treatment and residence security across borders. Institutionally, the outcome may be rationalised by a threefold limitation of the judicial function, which cannot bring about social change on its own, interacts with political actors and acknowledges the changing contours of the legal material.

In research on sensitive questions in surveys, the item count technique (ICT) has gained increased attention in recent years as a means of counteracting the problem of misreporting, that is, the under- and over-reporting of socially undesirable and socially desirable behaviors or attitudes. The performance of ICT compared with conventional direct questioning (DQ) has been investigated in numerous experimental studies, yielding mixed evidence. This calls for a systematic review.

For this purpose, the present article reports results from a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental studies comparing ICT estimates of sensitive items to those obtained via DQ. In total, 89 research articles with 124 distinct samples and 303 effect estimates are analyzed. All studies rely on the “more (less) is better” assumption, meaning that higher (lower) estimates of negatively (positively) connoted traits or behaviors are considered more valid.

The results show (1) a significantly positive pooled effect of ICT on the validity of survey responses compared with DQ; (2) a pronounced heterogeneity in study results, indicating uncertainty that ICT would work as intended in future studies; and (3) as meta-regression models indicate, the design and characteristics of studies, items, and ICT procedures affect the success of ICT. There is no evidence for an overestimation of the effect due to publication bias.

Our conclusions are that ICT is generally a viable method for measuring sensitive topics in survey studies, but its reliability has to be improved to ensure a more stable performance.

Recent research has shown that inequality between ethnic groups is strongly driven by politics, where powerful groups and elites channel the state's resources toward their constituencies. Most of the existing literature assumes that these politically induced inequalities are static and rarely change over time. We challenge this claim and argue that economic globalization and domestic institutions interact in shaping inequality between groups. In weakly institutionalized states, gains from trade primarily accrue to political insiders and their co-ethnics. By contrast, politically excluded groups gain ground where a capable and meritocratic state apparatus governs trade liberalization. Using nighttime luminosity data from 1992 to 2012 and a global sample of ethnic groups, we show that the gap between politically marginalized groups and their included counterparts has narrowed over time while economic globalization progressed at a steady pace. Our quantitative analysis and four qualitative case narratives show, however, that increasing trade openness is associated with economic gains accruing to excluded groups in only institutionally strong states, as predicted by our theoretical argument. In contrast, the economic gap between ethnopolitical insiders and outsiders remains constant or even widens in weakly institutionalized countries.

In the literatures on the lived experience of poverty and richness temporal dimensions are underappreciated. Comparing qualitative interviews with those at opposite ends of the income and wealth distributions in the UK, we examine a temporal contrast: while “poor” participants experience money as flows of income which focus orientation to the present and constrain orientation to the future, “rich” participants experience money not only as flows of income, but also in the form of a stock of wealth which facilitates long‐term orientations. Highlighting the enduring nature of wealth and the comparative short‐termism of income, we argue that the way in which capital and income relates to individuals' orientations to the future is important for understanding how economic inequality is experienced. Put differently, the form which economic resources take matters for one's ability to plan and control the future. This insight contributes to our understanding of the experience of being economically advantaged or disadvantaged, with implications for (social) policy.

Despite renewed interest in the role of business in shaping the welfare state, we still know little about how factions of capital adapt their strategies and translate these into political infighting and coalition building. Based on a detailed process tracing analysis of the political battle over German pension funds, this paper shows that cleavages within business do not necessarily run along the lines of finance vs. non-finance. While ‘financial challengers’ (banks and investment companies) advocated financialized pension funds, ‘financial incumbents’ (insurers) defended a conservative understanding of old age provision. Tremendous political momentum towards financialization notwithstanding, challengers remained largely unsuccessful. Incumbents elicited support from the wider business community by adjusting their strategic goals and engaging in discursive reformulations to effectively fight pension financialization from within capital. To accommodate such competition politics and coalition building, the paper argues for a more dynamic understanding of business strategizing and highlights the importance of discursive political strategies. It shows that some capitalists may act as antagonists of elements of financialization and problematizes the actual mechanisms of coalition building through which business plurality affects political outcomes.