After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 3 million people with German ancestors immigrated to Germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship. Exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic German immigrants by German authorities across regions upon arrival, we find that...

In this paper, we decompose body mass index (BMI) differences between Turkish immigrants and Germans in West Germany for women and men. We focus on isolating the part of BMI differences that can be explained by differences in observed socioeconomic status from the part attributable to...

We use census data on 26 Swiss cantons to determine the association of educational institutions with the intergenerational transmission of education. We test whether education transmission is higher when children enter kindergarten and school earlier and when tracking occurs at a later age. In...

This paper investigates how the size of co-ethnic networks at the time of arrival affect the economic success of immigrants in Germany. Applying panel analysis with a large set of fixed effects and controls, we isolate the association between initial network size and long-run immigrant outcomes....

We analyze normatively determined distributions of language rights in multilingual settings. It is shown in a welfare-maximizing model where rights today influence the status of a language in the future, that the “naïve” ex ante cost-benefit analysis has to be augmented in various...

This paper shows that households with positional concerns and convex status utility use gambling to attempt leapfrogging in the social hierarchy. We test this theoretical prediction relying on household data that is representative for Germany, proxying the status orientation of households by...