Publikationsliste KOPS

The paper examines the role of education as a causal channel through which growing up poor affects the economic outcomes in adulthood in the European Union. We apply a potential outcomes approach to quantify those effects and we provide a sensitivity analysis on possible unobserved confounders, such as child ability. Our estimates indicate that being poor in childhood significantly decreases the level of income in adulthood and increases the average probability of being poor. Moreover, our results reveal a significant role of education in this intergenerational transmission. These results are particularly relevant for Mediterranean and central and eastern European countries.

Lehrkräfteverbände wurden bislang in Untersuchungen zur Schulpolitik als Akteure vernachlässigt. Der Vergleich der Schulpolitiken in Frankreich und Deutschland auf dem Feld output- und wettbewerbsorientierter Reformen zeigt, dass Verbände von Lehrkräften in der Politikgestaltung eine wichtige Rolle spielen. In Frankreich konnten Lehrkräfteverbände Vorhaben zur Stärkung interner und externer Evaluationen sowie Wettbewerbsmaßnahmen blockieren. In Deutschland blieb der Widerstand von Verbänden dagegen aus und der Fokus richtete sich eher auf Feinjustierungen der Maßnahmen. Der Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit die unterschiedlichen Umsetzungen auf Machtpositionen sowie Interessen und Strategien der Verbände von Lehrkräften zurückgeführt werden können.

This research note presents EPAC 2017, a dataset resulting from the second round of an expert survey on ethnonationalism in party competition. EPAC provides cross-sectional data on the positions of (ethno-) national and mainstream parties on an ethnonational (also often referred to as ‘territorial’ or ‘centre-periphery’) dimension, as well as other important dimensions of political competition. The 2017 edition covers 222 political parties in 22 multinational European countries. The research note presents the main survey items and performs a series of validity and reliability tests on the data. Results show that EPAC 2017 provides valid and reliable measures of party positions on an ethnonational dimension. A short analysis of party system changes in Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the opportunities of combining the 2011 and 2017 editions. The combined dataset allows studying the mobilization of the centre-periphery cleavage in party competition across Eastern and Western Europe and over time.

Combining Tinto's classical model of student drop‐out with Kanter's assessment of minorities, this article examines the influence of gender composition in a field of study on drop‐out from higher education. Our empirical analysis is based on a sample of students who left German higher education in 2014. Our results confirm previous findings that women in gender‐atypical subjects show a higher drop‐out risk than their male fellow students. We assess several mechanisms which could contribute to explain this effect. Contrary to our expectations, social integration, in the sense of contact with lecturers, seems to be a protective factor for women and men in gender‐atypical subjects. For women in gender‐atypical fields of study, contact with peers is an additional protective factor against drop‐out. The most important mechanism to explain higher education drop‐out is women's more negative self‐assessment of their suitability for male‐dominated subjects.

This study analyzes the ways in which the Basque diaspora community in the United States consumes news media from their home origin. Using survey data collected from over 400 Basque-Americans with varying generations (first, second, third, etc.), we explore the ways in which surveyed individuals consume media from their ancestral territory of origin, in this case, the Basque Country of Spain and France. This research is exploratory and descriptive of the media habits and behavior of individuals with Basque origins. We find that significant shifts in media consumption occur between first generation immigrants and those beyond the second generation. As we move across generations, we observe that individuals shift from engagement with home-origin media to engagement with Basque cultural activities, such as dancing clubs. Our study suggests that the importance of digital media from the homeland is growing, but that most consumption of information by the Basque diaspora is through social networks. Our findings also suggest that, among those who continue to consume home-origin media, it is mainly through readership of national newspapers (in this case, from Spain) rather than local newspapers (from the Basque Country). This article enriches our understanding of the media habits of the Basque diaspora and raises questions for future research about the effect of transnational media consumption on the political, social and economic behavior of immigrants in the United States.

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The Crosswise Model (CM) has been proposed as a method to reduce effects of social desirability in sensitive questions. In contrast with former variants of Randomized Response Techniques (RRTs), the crosswise model neither offers a self-protective response strategy, nor does it require a random device. For these reasons, the crosswise model has received a lot of positive attention in the scientific community. However, previous validation studies have mostly analysed negatively connoted behaviour and thus draw on the principle of “more is better”. Higher prevalence rates of socially undesirable behaviour in the crosswise model cannot be attributed unambiguously to a reduction in social desirability bias, since random ticking resulting from respondent confusion about the question format cannot be ruled out as an alternative explanation. Unlike most research on crosswise models and randomized response techniques, we conduct an experiment in a general population survey that does not assess negatively connoted but socially desirable behaviour (namely, whether respondents had donated blood within the last twelve months). This design allows us to empirically disentangle the reduction of social desirability bias from random responses. We find signifcantly higher prevalence rates in the crosswise condition than in the direct question. What is more, we could not identify any subgroup of respondents, in which the CM successfully reduced social desirability bias. These results cast doubts on the validity of cosswise models. They suggest that a considerable number of respondents do not comply with the intended procedure.

The current study investigated links between students' level of perceived challenge (being over- or underchallenged) and students' career aspirations. We hypothesized indirect effects of over- and underchallenge on career aspirations via academic self-concept and academic trait boredom and tested our hypotheses in a sample of N = 662 Swiss eleventh grade students in the domains of German, French, and mathematics. Our results were consistent across all three domains and showed that being overchallenged had a negative impact on academic self-concept. Lower academic self-concept, in turn, was associated with decreased career aspirations. Being underchallenged enhanced academic self-concept, which was positively related to students' career aspirations. Further, both being over- and underchallenged enhanced students' domain-specific boredom experiences resulting in a decrease in their career aspirations. As such, the effect of being underchallenged was of particular importance as its influence on career aspirations via academic trait boredom was negative, whereas via academic self-concept there was a positive indirect effect.