Mental Health Challenges Among Teachers: The Role of the Workplace, joint with Antonia Entorf and Miriam Gensowski
Teacher mental health is an increasingly salient issue with societal and economic implications for educational quality and student outcomes. This study examines the role of schools as workplaces in generating heterogeneity in teachers’ mental health. Using comprehensive population-wide Danish register data linking teachers to schools, students, and health care utilization, we document large and persistent differences in mental health outcomes across schools. We attribute these differences to causal workplace effects rather than selection, leveraging a quasi-experimental mover design: teachers’ mental health deteriorates after moving to schools with worse mental health environments, with effects unfolding over the subsequent years. These effects are robust to coinciding life events, such as childbirth or changes in cohabitation status. Auxiliary analyses based on variation over time in student composition find that higher shares of female students and students from higher-SES households are associated with improved teacher mental health of teachers. Yet, observable characteristics explain only a small share of variation, suggesting that unobserved dimensions of workplace quality, such as leadership and organizational climate, play a central role as potential drivers of heterogeneity in teacher mental health.
Changing Work Climate: The Implications of Extreme Temperatures for Occupational Choice, joint with Nico Pestel, Harald Pfeiffer and Marc Witte, pre-registered at AEA RCT registry (AEARCTR-0016919)
Extreme weather events, intensified by climate change, are reshaping working conditions in many occupations. How workers respond depends not only on realized exposure but also on heterogeneous preferences over outdoor work. To quantify this heterogeneity, we conduct a discrete choice experiment showing that workers differ sharply in their valuation of outdoor exposure, which constitutes an amenity for some and a disamenity for others, generating strong sorting across occupations. Motivated by this evidence, we investigate how exposure to extreme temperatures affects occupational choice among present and future workers. Using administrative data from Germany and the Netherlands linked to high-resolution temperature records, we examine whether workers’ decisions to enter or leave outdoor-exposed occupations respond to extreme heat and cold episodes. We find that such events reduce the number of new apprenticeships in outdoor-exposed occupations and increase transitions toward less exposed jobs. The resulting reallocation may exacerbate labor shortages in sectors critical for the green transition, amplifying the societal costs of climate change.
Sexual Harassment At The Workplace - The Role of Managers and Firm Policies, joint with Jonas Jessen and Valentina Götz, pre-registered at AEA RCT registry (AEARCTR- 0015274)
This paper investigates the prevalence and perceived consequences of workplace sexual harassment in Germany, focusing on the role of firm-level policies and managerial characteristics. Using two newly collected matched employer–employee survey modules linked to administrative records, we document both the incidence of harassment and workers’ perceived risk from employee and firm perspectives. We embed a discrete choice experiment to estimate workers’ willingness to forgo earnings in order to avoid harassment-exposed workplaces and to examine the mitigating roles of firm policies and manager gender. Approximately 13\% of establishments report recent harassment cases, while 26\% of women and 14\% of men report lifetime workplace experiences. Gender gaps in reported exposure are not explained by differences in definitions of harassment. Our experimental evidence indicates that workers—particularly women—are willing to forgo substantial earnings to avoid employers with a history of harassment. Female managers and formal harassment policies partially offset these negative valuations. However, only 60\% of firms report having formal complaint procedures, and preventive training remains rare. Harassment policies do not systematically reduce perceived risk, but they are positively associated with a stronger discussion culture and higher reporting rates. Trust in employer responses is uneven: women, particularly those with prior exposure to harassment, express significantly lower confidence in managerial action.
Sexual Harassment in Tertiary Education, joint with Miriam Gensowski, Barbara Tagmose and Miriam Wüst
We study the prevalence, causes, and consequences of sexual harassment in Danish tertiary education by combining large-scale survey data from the Danish Study Environment Survey with comprehensive administrative registers covering educational trajectories, mental health care use, and early labor market outcomes. We document substantial prevalence of sexual harassment among students, with pronounced heterogeneity across gender, age, and programs: around 14 percent of female and 10 percent of male students report harassment within their current study program. Exploiting idiosyncratic cohort-to-cohort variation on a granular program-level, we identify we gender minority status as a systemic causal determinant behind victimization risk for female students: a 10 percentage point increase in the share of opposite-gender peers raises reported harassment among women by 10–12 percent relative to the mean, with no corresponding effect for men. We document that harassment experiences are consequential: they are systematically associated with adverse outcomes for both women and men, including higher dropout risks, deteriorating mental health, and weaker early labor market attachment. Taken together, our findings indicate that sexual harassment constitutes a structural risk in tertiary education with economically meaningful consequences. They suggest that sexual harassment may contribute to self-reinforcing patterns of gender segregation that originate in education and persist into the labor market.
How Students Use AI, joint with Henning Hermes, pre-registered at AEA RCT registry (AEARCTR-0014959)
We study how students use an AI chatbot deployed at a German distance-learning university, drawing on the complete log of chatbot interactions classified into query types. We document who adopts AI assistance, how intensively, and for what purposes, and find substantial heterogeneity in adoption and use patterns across gender, age, study field, and prior digital skills. A central focus is whether students use AI to augment their learning — seeking explanations, practice, or feedback — or to substitute for their own cognitive effort by delegating writing, calculation, and problem-solving tasks, and how this composition shifts as students gain familiarity with the tool. To identify the causal effect of AI adoption on academic outcomes, we exploit a randomized email encouragement design that generates exogenous variation in chatbot use.
Productivity Spillovers in International Teams: Insights from GitHub Activity Data, joint with Felix Holub and Beate Thies
Based on time-stamped GitHub activity data we identify endogenous peer effects among professional software developers through exogenous productivity shocks to co-workers. We exploit the North American spring transition into Daylight Saving Time (DST) as an exogenous shock to output quantity and quality among North American developers. This productivity shock spills over to non-affected developers in other regions who collaborate with peers in North America, indicating strong complementarities in software production. The spillovers mostly affect coding activity and are stronger for inexperienced developers. They arise both when peers specialized in coding (substitutes) and when peers specialized in managerial or reviewer roles (complements) are hit by the shock. Using sentiment analysis of issue comments, we further show that peer shocks are accompanied by changes in the tone of developer communication, consistent with behavioral responses in collaborative work.
