The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...

This paper studies the causal effect of English proficiency on residential location outcomes and the socioeconomic class of immigrants in England and Wales, exploiting a natural experiment. Based on the phenomenon that young children learn a new language more easily than older children, we...

This paper proposes a stylised model to derive the effect of a sizeable middle class on average educational outcomes. Under reasonable assumptions, the model predicts that the spending share on education increases if the middle class becomes larger such that the size of the middle class has a...

Die Europäisierungsforschung widmet sich der Erforschung der Rückwirkungen der europäischen Integration auf die EU-Mitgliedstaaten. Trotz der Bedeutung von Kapital und Arbeit und ihren Organisationen für die politischen Ökonomien der EU-Mitgliedstaaten hat die Europäisierungslite-ratur den...

This paper evaluates the importance of middle class vulnerability to poverty for subjective well-being (happiness) in European countries. Using the special module of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions micro-data on well-being and national aggregates from the World...