Publications
(with Arnaud Chevalier, Ben Elsner and Nico Pestel)
Journal of the European Economic Association, Issue 22-2, April 2024
We study the effect of forced migration on public policy setting in the migrant-receiving country. After World War II, eight million expelled Germans arrived in West Germany within five years. We use regional variation in the population share of forced migrants across West German cities to estimate the effect of this inflow on cities' taxation and spending decisions. To identify a causal effect, we pursue an instrumental variable strategy that leverages push factors of the expulsions while being orthogonal to local conditions in the destination regions. Our results show that cities with high inflows of forced migrants increased spending on welfare and education, decreased spending on infrastructure, raised local taxes, and incurred more debt. Part of these effects can be attributed to shifts in political preferences. The migrants held voting rights upon arrival and supported parties that explicitly catered to their interests and needs.
The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany
(with Max Löffler and Sebastian Siegloch)
Journal of the European Economic Association, Issue 19-2, April 2021
We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and administrative features of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the long-term, post-reunification effect of government surveillance. We find that a higher spying density led to persistently lower levels of interpersonal and institutional trust in post-reunification Germany. We also find substantial and long-lasting economic effects of Stasi surveillance, resulting in lower income, higher exposure to unemployment, and lower self-employment.
Benefit Duration, Job Search Behavior and Re-Employment Outcomes
(with Amelie Schiprowski)
This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects early job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance (UI) scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months for benefit recipients of age 50 to 54. Based on detailed survey data and a difference-in-differences design, we estimate that one additional month of potential benefits reduces early job applications by around 10%. Using social security data, we further find that the extension of benefits increases the average nonemployment duration of individuals entering UI after the reform. Among individuals who got treated at later stages of their unemployment spell, the increased UI coverage does not appear to come at the cost of longer nonemployment. A cautious back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals substantial job finding returns to early search effort.
Productivity Effects of Air Pollution: Evidence from Professional Soccer
(with Nico Pestel and Eric Sommer)
We estimate the causal effect of ambient air pollution on individual productivity using panel data on the universe of professional soccer players in Germany over the period from 1999 to 2011 matched to hourly information on the concentration of particulate matter near each stadium at the time of kick-off. We exploit exogenous variation in players’ exposure to air pollution due to match scheduling rules that are beyond the control of teams and players. The results of our analysis reveal statistically significant negative effects of air pollution on players’ productivity, measured by the total number of passes per match. Allowing for a non-linear dose-response relationship further reveals that our findings are not driven by extreme levels of air pollution. Rather, negative effects already emerge at moderate levels.
Exporting and Labor Demand: Micro-level evidence from Germany
(with Andreas Peichl and Sebastian Siegloch)
Canadian Journal of Economics, Vol 50, November 2017
It is widely believed that globalization increases the extent of employment and wage responses to economic shocks. In this paper, we investigate the effect of firms’ exporting activities on the wage elasticity of labour demand. Using rich, administrative linked employer–employee panel data from Germany and destination‐specific industry‐level information on trade flows, we explicitly control for self‐selection into exporting and endogeneity concerns. Overall, we find that exporting has a significant positive effect on the (absolute value of the) unconditional wage elasticity of labour demand. In line with our hypothesis, we further show that the effect is particularly strong for those plants that export a significant share of their output to low‐ and medium‐income countries, hence face relatively more price‐elastic product demand.
The Elasticity of Labor Demand: A Meta-Regression Analysis
(with Andreas Peichl and Sebastian Siegloch)
The own-wage elasticity of labor demand is a key parameter in empirical research and policy analysis. However, despite extensive research, estimates of labor demand elasticities are subject to considerable heterogeneity. In this paper, we explore various dimensions of this heterogeneity by means of a comprehensive meta-regression analysis, building on information from 151 different studies containing 1334 estimates in total. Our results show that heterogeneity in the estimates of the elasticity is natural to a considerable extent: the magnitude of the elasticity depends on the theoretical model applied and features of the workforce. Moreover, we find that labor demand has become more elastic over time, and is particularly elastic in countries with low levels of employment protection legislation. Furthermore, we find heterogeneity due to the empirical specification of the labor demand model, characteristics of the dataset and publication bias.