Research

Publications

The Morning After:
Prescription-Free Access to Emergency Contraceptive Pills

joint with Gregor Pfeifer
Journal of Health Economics (2023): 102775

We analyze the introduction of prescription-free access to morning-after pills — emergency contraceptives aiming to prevent unintended pregnancy and subsequent abortion after unprotected sexual intercourse. Exploiting a staggered difference-in-differences setting for Europe combined with randomization inference, we find sharp increases in sales and manufacturers’ revenues (100%). However, whilst not reducing abortions significantly, the policy triggers an unexpected increase in fertility of 4%, particularly among women aged 25–34. We elaborate on mechanisms by looking at within-country evidence from several EU countries, which suggests that fertility is driven by decreasing use of birth control pills in response to easier access to morning-after pills.

free JHE-download until September 01, 2023 via this link

Recent Version
and Randomization Inference Appendix

Goodbye Smokers' Corner: Health Effects of School Smoking Bans

joint with Gregor Pfeifer and Kristina Strohmaier

Journal of Human Resources, 55(3), (2020), 1068-1104

We study the impact of school smoking bans on individual health behavior in Germany. Using a multiple difference-in-differences approach in combination with randomization inference, we find that for individuals affected by a smoking ban during their school time, the propensity toward smoking declines by 14 to 22 percent, while the number of smoked cigarettes per day decreases by 19 to 25 percent. After elaborating on treatment effect heterogeneity and intensity, we evaluate spillovers to smoking behavior of non-treated individuals living in the same household.

Link to paper/preprint

Coverage

Smoking and Local Unemployment: Evidence from Germany

joint with Micha Kaiser, Alfonso Sousa-Poza and Kristina Strohmaier

Economics and Human Biology, 29, (2018), 138–147

In this paper, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate the effect of macroeconomic conditions (in the form of local unemployment rates) on smoking behavior. The results from our panel data models, several of which control for selection bias, indicate that the propensity to become a smoker increases significantly during an economic downturn, with an approximately 0.7 percentage point increase for each percentage point rise in the unemployment rate. Conversely, conditional on the individual being a smoker, cigarette consumption decreases with rising unemployment rates, with a one percentage point increase in the regional unemployment rate leading to a decrease in consumption up to 0.8 percent.

Link to paper

Gender Differences in Wage Expectations: The Role of Biased Beliefs

joint with Stephanie Briel, Aderonke Osikominu, Gregor Pfeifer and Sascha Satlukal

Empirical Economics 62(1), (2022), 187-212

We analyze gender differences in expected starting salaries along the wage expectations distribution of prospective university students in Germany, using elicited beliefs about both own salaries and salaries for average other students in the same field. Unconditional and conditional quantile regressions show 5–15% lower wage expectations for females. At all percentiles considered, the gender gap is more pronounced in the distribution of expected own salary than in the distribution of wages expected for average other students. Decomposition results show that biased beliefs about the own earnings potential relative to others and about average salaries play a major role in explaining the gender gap in wage expectations for oneself.

Coverage on an old version (in German)

Link to paper

Work in Progress

Does Smoking Affect Wages?

joint with Gregor Pfeifer and Kristina Strohmaier

This paper studies the causal effect of smoking on labor market outcomes. We exploit exposure to school smoking bans as a source of exogenous variation in smoking behavior and combine evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with administrative employment records from the Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (SIAB). While school smoking bans significantly reduce smoking prevalence, we find no evidence of an overall negative causal effect of smoking on wages. Instead, the effects differ sharply by gender: smoking is associated with a wage premium among men but a wage penalty among women. The findings point to the importance of workplace interactions, social norms, and gender-specific labor market mechanisms in shaping the economic consequences of health behaviors.

All Together Now? The Expansion of Comprehensive Schooling in Germany

joint with Henri Pfleiderer and Kristina Strohmaier

This study assesses the impact of comprehensive schooling expansion in Germany, exploiting school reforms across two states between 2006 and 2010. Our analysis encompasses student achievement, specifically math test scores in ninth grade and overall educational attainment, alongside non-cognitive skills and pro-social behavior, to explore the broader effects of comprehensive education. Furthermore, we investigate comprehensive schooling’s role in enhancing inter-generational mobility by examining its influence on the correlation between students’ educational attainment and that of their parents. The findings indicate that comprehensive schooling not only significantly improves math performance and increases educational attainment by an average of 0.2 years but also promotes greater equity and efficiency within the educational system. While the impact on pro-social behavior remains somewhat ambiguous, the evidence strongly supports comprehensive schooling as a catalyst for both academic success and social mobility.

Fast-Track to Family? Evidence from the G8 High School Reform in Germany

joint with Henrike Alm and Olivia Masi (DFG project no. 543094880)

Many OECD countries experience rising educational attainment alongside delayed childbirth. This paper examines whether reducing the duration of secondary school affects family formation. Germany’s G8 reform compressed the academic school track (Gymnasium) from nine to eight years while keeping the total instruction hours unchanged. We exploit the reform’s staggered adoption in the federal states in 2001-2009 with a difference-in-differences design and use German Microcensus data. We confirm that G8 lowers the age at which students graduate from school and complete their education. Next, we find that 22-year-old individuals, who are typically just completing their studies, are almost 18% more likely to be in full-time employment, indicating earlier entry into the labor market of G8 cohorts. We further observe a shift in fertility timing, with G8-exposed individuals being 40% more likely to have had their first child by age 30. The results reveal that freeing a year in early adulthood, while holding qualification constant, can ease the education–fertility conflict for women and support gender-equitable policy goals.

Link to preliminar working paper version (Aug. 2025)

Cross-Substance Spillovers and Peer Disruption:
Evidence from School Smoking Bans

with Henrike Alm, Gregor Pfeifer, and Kristina Strohmaier

Cross-substance policy spillovers are well documented, but whether they arise from peer disruption or attitude change has not been identified. We exploit the staggered introduction of school smoking bans in Germany, which - unlike price or access policies - act on a shared social space where these two explanations make distinct predictions. Bans reduce smoking prevalence by 22.5%, but their larger effects lie elsewhere: the probability of having ever been drunk falls by 15% overall and 26% among men, regular alcohol consumption by 30%, and cannabis use among men by 35%. The mechanism is peer disruption, not attitude change. Drinking with friends falls by 21% overall and 26% among men, drinking with family is unaffected, and friend group membership among men falls by 13%. Attitude indices toward smoking and alcohol, by contrast, are unchanged.

Abortion Liberalization and Women’s Reproductive and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Europe

with Christopher Griffin, Aderonke Osikominu and Gregor Pfeifer

Compressed Schooling and Leisure Activities: Impacts of the German G8 Reform

joint with Aderonke Osikominu

--- CURRENTLY INACTIVE ---

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the impact of compressed schooling on leisure behavior. Using representative longitudinal data, we exploit state, year, and grade level variation in the implementation of the G8 reform, a short schooling system for German upper secondary school tracks, to identify the effects of interest. The estimates of our difference-in-differences approach show no significant effects for a broad range of leisure activities. Solely for sports and technical related activities, highly significant reductions of up to 80% appear which girls and boys respectively drive. To account for the cluster structure in the data and the small number of clusters (states) we evaluate the statistical significance of the effects by randomization inference.

Heterogeneous Effects of School Smoking Bans on Subjective Well-Being

Contraceptives, Abortions, Fertility, Family Planning in Germany and Europe

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