Publikationsliste KOPS

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the decision-making accuracy. Our theoretical analysis generates two major predictions. First, a committee operating under the threat of leaks is equivalent to a formally transparent committee in terms of the probabilities of project implementation as well as welfare (despite differences in individual voting behavior). Second, the threat of leaks causes a committee to recommend rejection of a project whenever precise information has been shared among committee members. As a consequence, a status-quo bias arises. Our laboratory results confirm these predictions despite subjects communicating less strategically than predicted.

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Die Corona-Krise hat für viele Beschäftigte zu einer schnellen und tiefgreifenden Veränderung ihres Arbeitsalltags geführt. Zur Einhaltung sozialer Distanzierung haben private und öffentliche Organisationen ihre Belegschaft ganz oder teilweise ins Homeoffice geschickt. Die vorliegende Studie vermisst diese neue Arbeitswelt auf einer einzigartigen Datengrundlage: Einer Umfrage unter rund 700 Beschäftigten im Homeoffice über neun Erhebungszeitpunkte hinweg. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die empfundene Produktivität und das Engagement der Beschäftigten durch die Arbeit im Homeoffice gefördert werden und sich eine große Mehrheit wünscht, zumindest teilweise weiterhin mobil zu arbeiten. Jedoch wird auch eine Tendenz zu Mehrarbeit und damit einhergehender Erschöpfung deutlich. Das erhöht den Handlungsdruck für die Politik und die Vertretungen von Betrieben und Beschäftigten. Die Studie schließt mit Empfehlungen, wie die Rahmenbedingungen für das Arbeiten im Homeoffice verbessert werden können.

The HybOrg research project focuses on the administrative management of the so-called refugee crisis in Germany between 2015 and 2016. It asks about the societal effect of variation in local crisis management (Landkreise and kreisfreie Städte). This document is a technical report of German-wide survey among the local administration to assess the reactions to the increase in the number of asylum seekers in 2015/16.

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dc.contributor.author: Hermle, Johannes; Hensel, Lukas; Roth, Christopher

According to the conventional wisdom, political polarization has been growing in the past few decades, and increasing inequality and financial crises have fuelled this trend. Making use of new measures and differentiating between parliamentary and electoral polarization across the left-right cleavage, this article offers a comparative evaluation of this claim for the OECD countries. The results show that the electorates in the European Union have become more conflictive, while the political parties represented in the national parliaments have moved in opposite direction. The statistical analysis demonstrates in line with the theoretical expectations that currency crises have increased mass polarization. The article also offers some tentative support for the hypothesis that increased levels of income inequality enhance this trend and that growing elite discord increases the left-right confrontation in the electorate.

The ways in which countries have reacted to financial crises varies considerably. While income inequality has grown in more than half of the EU member states after the Great Recession, some countries such as the United States have experienced a significant increase in wealth inequality. A number of countries, by contrast, was able to keep these inequities at bay. We argue in this paper that the impact of financial crises on inequality differ between the type and severity of these economic shocks and that sovereign debt and exchange rate rather than banking crises increase the economic inequities. The paper also examines the extent to which fiscal constraints of governments and membership in the Eurozone mediate these effects. We examine the diverse income and wealth inequality effects to more than 50 financial crises across the OECD member states from 1970 to 2010. The empirical evidence gathered so far supports our conjecture of different distributive effects of varying types of crises.

In many games of imperfect information, players can make Bayesian inferences about other players’ types based on the information that is contained in their own type. Several behavioral theories of belief-updating even start from the assumption that players project their own type onto others also when it is not rational. We investigate such inferences in a simple laboratory task, in which types are drawn from one out of two states of the world and participants have to guess the type of another participant. We nd lile evidence for irrational (over-)projection. Instead, between 50% and 70% of the participants in our experiment completely neglect the information contained in their own type and base their choices only on the prior probabilities. Using several experimental interventions, we show that this striking neglect of information is very robust.

In this paper we determine the cost of fatalities resulting from road traffic injuries (RTIs) in South Africa. We express the costs in terms of reduced life expectancy and years of potential life lost (YPLL). Our main data source is the Injury Mortality Survey, a retrospective descriptive study carried out in 2009 in South Africa. Using the mortality rates by sex and age from the mortuary data we calculate actual life expectancy at birth. In our counterfactual analysis we assume a reduction of 15% reduction per year in road fatalities for a period of 10 years. A comparison of the estimated actual and counterfactual life expectancies suggests that the average gain in life expectancy at birth would be 0.58 years. Since the overwhelming majority of road traffic fatalities are male (75.7%), there is a considerable gender difference. Men would gain 0.85 years while women would gain 0.30 years in life expectancy, closing the gender gap in life expectancy by about 14%. We then discuss how a reduction in RTIs could be achieved. South Africa’s legislation already covers all important aspects of road safety (e.g. seat belt use, drink driving restrictions, speed limits, infrastructure improvements), however, enforcement is relatively weak and should be improved. There are a raft of measures that have been well researched in other countries, most interventions aim to modify the behaviour of road users and have been found to be cost effective. In addition to stricter enforcement, evidence from social science suggests that compliance could be increased through a change in social norms regarding road usage.

The coronavirus crisis exacerbates inequality in the European Union. It gives rise to a critical debate about the future of Europe concerning a key question: In what way does the project of integration require a higher degree of European solidarity? To what extent are Europeans willing to help each other, and what kind of help are they willing to provide? The results from a recent survey of the German residential population, presented in this paper, offer a mixed picture: Whereas people strongly support medical solidarity, their willingness to support fi nancial redistribution is limited. As a consequence, it will be crucial to use ideational leadership to activate the potential for solidarity towards a united, viable Europe marked by limited inequality—especially with the German Council Presidency commencing on July 1st, 2020.

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