This paper studies the long-run macroeconomic, distributional and welfare effects of tuition policy and student loans. We therefore form a rich model of risky human capital investment based on the seminal work of Heckman, Lochner and Taber (1998). We extend their original model by variable labor...

This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. A major goal of the program is to improve the participants’ economic self-sufficiency and family planning. I use administrative data from the German...

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a...

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004) prediction that individuals' reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference incomeis not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the...

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...

The major event of the 9/11 terror attacks is likely to have induced an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiments, not only among US residents but also beyond US borders. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and exploiting exogenous variation in interview...

Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) data, this paper offers the first evidence that the 2011 news revelations about crimes committed by National Socialist Underground (NSU) network in early the 2000s resulted in an increase in worries about xenophobic hostility among NSU’s targeted...

Using a rich panel data set, I estimate wage assimilation patterns for immigrants in Germany as an example of a key European destination country. This study contributes to the literature by performing separate estimations by skill groups. Comparisons with similar natives reveal that immigrants'...

This paper uses a large survey (SOEP) to update and deepen our knowledge about the labor market performance of immigrants in Germany. It documents that immigrant workers initially earn on average 20 percent less than native workers with otherwise identical characteristics. The gap is smaller for...