This paper investigates the role that pre-immigration skills play in immigrants job-finding processes in Germany. We first show theoretically that the job-finding rate for the high-skilled varies depending on their search strategy: if they are prepared to look for both unskilled as well as...

We investigate whether working time is related to the intensity of income comparisons and relative income. Our simple theoretical model demonstrates that the effects of relative income concerns depend on whether an individual can choose contractual working hours and/or overtime. In the empirical...

We present a model of opinion formation where individuals repeatedly engage in discussion and update their opinion in a social network similarly to the DeGroot model. Abstracting from the standard assumption that individuals always report their opinion truthfully, agents in our model may state...

Friedrich Froebel, a German pedagogue, established the first kindergarten worldwide in Thuringia in 1839. We study the spatial dissemination of the kindergarten movement in Germany in the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Spatial dissemination can be explained by the cultural proximity,...

The formation of party preferences is a complex and not yet fully understood process based on a number of factors. This process, which is of great interest for both social and political science, is usually studied using questionnaire data which has proven to be a very reliable yet often costly...

Using an epidemiological approach, we study the cultural influence on fertility outcomes of first- and second-generation female immigrants based on a 1% sample of the German population. We proxy for culture in the country of origin using total fertility rates from the year of migration, survey...

This paper evaluates the effect of becoming citizen of the host-country at birth on educational outcomes of immigrant children in Germany. We exploit the introduction of birthright citizenship for newborn children in Germany starting on the 1st of January, 2000, to obtain...

Ethnic groups tend to agglomerate and assemble, mostly in urban areas. While ethnic clustering is critically debated in societies and the consequences for economic outcomes are under debate in research, the process is not yet well understood. A separate literature has also examined the cultural...

Does granting citizenship at birth help immigrant children to integrate in the host country's educational system and thus, to promote their educational success? Our identification strategy is based on a reform of the German naturalization law in 2000. We exploit this natural experiment and use a...

This paper analyzes wage assimilation of ethnic German immigrants to Germany. We use unique administrative data that include a standardized measure of immigrants' pre-migration wage based on occupation, industry, tenure, qualification, and the German wage structure. We find that immigrants...