Pension funds carry implications on citizens wellbeing in their retirement years and countries’ growths, rendering changes to them following natural disasters of great importance. Using administrative data that comprises a 10 percent random sample of the Australian population and a natural experimental design, we investigate the effects of natural disasters on retirement savings in the aftermath...
-- joint with Panu Poutvaara and Max Steinhardt This study analyzes the determinants of bitterness, which describes a feeling of not having achieved what one deserves compared to others. First, we perform pooled OLS and fixed effects regressions, showing that bitterness is associated with various economic and non-economic factors, whereby the effect of unemployment stands out. Therefore, in the...
Scenarios for financing an unconditional basic income are being developed in the project. Furthermore, the revenue and distribution effects of basic income and financing options are analyzed.
Do politically administered mass layoffs undermine trust and political interest? During the German reunification, formerly state-owned socialist firms in East Germany were privatized by the Treuhand, which came at the cost of massive job losses and public protest. I demonstrate that these activities had a detrimental effect on attitudes and political behavior of the affected individuals. Using survey ...
This study uses administrative data on the universe of students in tertiary education in Germany and shows that university enrollment depends negatively on the local unemployment rate at high school graduation. This finding contradicts common evidence on countercyclical US undergraduate enrollment. Students' financial dependency and loan aversion suggest reduced parental income as dominant...
This paper aims to investigate whether Van Parijs' theory of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) can address the criticism of the lack of individual responsibility on the part of recipients. To do so, I relate this UBI theory to the results of field experiments that study the impact of UBI on employment. Theoretical and empirical results suggest that the UBI does not lead to a decrease in labor...
Higher wage dispersion may induce unemployed workers to search longer for a job by increasing their reservation wages. This paper investigates the implications of this mechanism in a job search model featuring a finite work life, showing that a mean-preserving spread of the wage offer distribution could lead to a larger increase in reservation wages of younger than older workers because the...
This dissertation comprises four empirical chapters which contribute to the fields of labor economics, inequality research, and health economics. The first chapter studies the relationship between the spatial distribution of labor market inspections and non-compliance with Germany’s Minimum Wage Law. By combining novel administrative data on labor market inspections with the German Socio-economic Panel ...