Publikationen

We exploit the 1997 school reform that prolonged compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years to investigate the causal effect of education on emigration intentions. Our IV estimates indicate that an additional year of schooling increases the probability of reporting the intention to emigrate by 24% points. Moreover, we provide evidence that the identified effect of education on emigration intentions does not operate through financial dissatisfaction, but rather through displeasure at a bleak political environment that better educated people are more keenly aware of.

This paper uses Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks to extract information from the intraday high-frequency returns to forecast daily volatility. Applied to the IBM stock, we find significant improvements in the forecasting performance of models that use this extracted information compared to the forecasts of models that omit the extracted information and some of the most popular alternative models. Furthermore, we find that extracting the information through Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks is superior to two Mixed Data Sampling alternatives.

What is an effective vaccination policy to end the COVID-19 pandemic? We address this question in a model of the dynamics of policy effectiveness drawing upon the results of a large panel survey implemented in Germany during the first and second waves of the pandemic. We observe increased opposition to vaccinations were they to be legally required. In contrast, for voluntary vaccinations, there was higher and undiminished support. We find that public distrust undermines vaccine acceptance, and is associated with a belief that the vaccine is ineffective and, if enforced, compromises individual freedom. We model how the willingness to be vaccinated may vary over time in response to the fraction of the population already vaccinated and whether vaccination has occurred voluntarily or not. A negative effect of enforcement on vaccine acceptance (of the magnitude observed in our panel or even considerably smaller) could result in a large increase in the numbers that would have to be vaccinated unwillingly in order to reach a herd-immunity target. Costly errors may be avoided if policy makers understand that citizens' preferences are not fixed but will be affected both by the crowding-out effect of enforcement and by conformism. Our findings have broad policy applicability beyond COVID-19 to cases in which voluntary citizen compliance is essential because state capacities are limited and because effectiveness may depend on the ways that the policies themselves alter citizens' beliefs and preferences.

Quantifying the timing and content of policy changes affecting international travel and immigration is key to ongoing research on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the socioeconomic impacts of border closures. The COVID Border Accountability Project (COBAP) provides a hand-coded dataset of >1000 policies systematized to reflect a complete timeline of country-level restrictions on movement across international borders during 2020. Trained research assistants used pre-set definitions to source, categorize and verify for each new border policy: start and end dates, whether the closure is "complete" or "partial", which exceptions are made, which countries are banned, and which air/land/sea borders were closed. COBAP verified the database through internal and external audits from public health experts. For purposes of further verification and future data mining efforts of pandemic research, the full text of each policy was archived. The structure of the COBAP dataset is designed for use by social and biomedical scientists. For broad accessibility to policymakers and the public, our website depicts the data in an interactive, user-friendly, time-based map.

Since 2015, an enormous number of refugees have migrated to Germany. To obtain qualifi ed jobs, many of them attend prevocational preparation classes. The aims of these classes are mainly the acquisition of German language skills and preparation for subsequent vocational education and training. This paper examines (1) the transitions of young refugees after prevocational preparation classes and (2) what factors predict the transition to the next educational step. Using data from the fi rst two measurement points of a longitudinal survey (t1 during the prevocational preparation class and t2 one year later), we surveyed 333 students in Southwest Germany (82% male; mean age = 18.9 years). Instruments included an online questionnaire, an online test of cognitive ability, and an online test of German language skills. Approximately 37 percent of the students repeated the prevocational preparation class, whereas 60 percent moved on to the next educational step. German language skills at t1 and contact with people helping refugees (t1) predicted the probability of the transition to a “regular” educational pathway. Other variables, such as the educational background of the young refugees and of their parents, personality, motivation, and aspirations, had no significant effects. The findings can be interpreted in terms of the primary (language skills) and secondary eff ects of refugees’ ethnic background (information about the education system through contact with locals).

We investigate whether risk, time, environmental, and social preferences affect single-family homeowners’ investments in the energy efficiency of their house using established experimental measures and questionnaires. We find that homeowners who report to be more risk taking are more likely to have renovated their house. Pro-environmental and future-oriented renovators, i.e. renovators with lower discount factors, live in homes with higher energy efficiency. Pro-social preferences as measured in a dictator game relates positively to the energy quality of renovated houses. Controlling for the energy efficiency of houses, we further find that energy consumption as measured by heating and electricity costs is lower for future-oriented and pro-environmental individuals.

In order to provide adaptive instruction in heterogeneous classes, teachers have to consider performance-related information for their decisions on which task difficulty level fits best for a particular student. Focusing on prospective teachers’ data-based decision-making, we aim to investigate their use of proximal and distal indicators of students’ ability and readiness to deal successfully with domain-specific tasks that are available for 32 student cases in a digital test environment. To address several hypotheses on the participants’ information-processing behaviors and decisions, we conducted a within-subject experiment in which we systematically varied the informational consistency of the presented student cases. We used a mixed-methods approach to measure observable information-processing behavior and decision-making. We assessed the effects of consistent/inconsistent cases on the amount, sequence, and perceived relevance of selected information, the type of processed information, the time needed for information processing, and the subjective confidence when making a decision via linear dynamic panel-data modeling.

Effective states govern by some combination of enforcement and voluntary compliance. To contain the COVID-19 pandemic, a critical decision is the extent to which policy makers rely on voluntary as opposed to enforced compliance, and nations vary along this dimension. While enforcement may secure higher compliance, there is experimental and other evidence that it may also crowd out voluntary motivation. How does enforcement affect citizens' support for anti-COVID-19 policies? A survey conducted with 4,799 respondents toward the end of the first lockdown in Germany suggests that a substantial share of the population will support measures more under voluntary than under enforced implementation. Negative responses to enforcement-termed control aversion-vary across the nature of the policy intervention (e.g., they are rare for masks and frequent for vaccination and a cell-phone tracing app). Control aversion is less common among those with greater trust in the government and the information it provides, and among those who were brought up under the coercive regime of East Germany. Taking account of the likely effectiveness of enforcement and the extent to which near-universal compliance is crucial, the differing degrees of opposition to enforcement across policies suggest that for some anti-COVID-19 policies an enforced mandate would be unwise, while for others it would be essential. Similar reasoning may also be relevant for policies to address future pandemics and other societal challenges like climate change.

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic politico-economic model of sovereign debt to analyze the impact of bailouts on political turnover and sovereign default risk. We consider a small open economy in which the government has access to official loans conditional on the implementation of austerity policies. There is a two-party system in which both parties care about the population’s welfare but differ in an exogenous utility cost of default. Political turnover is the endogenous outcome of the individual voting behavior. In a quantitative application to the Greek economy, we find that bailouts amplify political turnover risk, which, in turn, elevates sovereign interest spreads. While stricter conditionality fosters the probability of political turnover and sovereign default in the short run, it may mitigate political turnover and default risk in the long run. The frequency of political turnover is U-shaped in the strength of conditionality.

Purpose
Scholarly interest in interorganizational learning (IOL) has spiked in the past decade because of its potential to absorb, transfer and create valuable knowledge for enhanced innovative performance and sustained competitive advantage. However, only a handful of review studies exists on the topic. The evolution of IOL has not been studied explicitly and there is a lack of understanding of the field trends. To fill this gap, this paper aims to comprehensively review the literature on IOL and map its evolution and trends using bibliometric techniques. In particular, the authors use visualization of science mapping freeware to systematize the findings and interpret the results.

Design/methodology/approach
The authors synthesize the findings using “evaluative bibliometric techniques” to identify the quality and quantity indicators of the IOL research and use “relational bibliometric techniques” to determine the structural indicators of the IOL field such as the intellectual foundations and emerging research themes of IOL research.

Findings
Through an analysis of 208 journal publications obtained from the Scopus database, the authors determine the leading authors, countries, highly cited papers and their contributions to the IOL literature. By identifying the key hotspots, intellectual foundations and emerging trends of IOL, the authors provide promising avenues in IOL research.

Originality/value
To the best of the knowledge, this study is the first to systematically review the IOL literature and provide future research directions.

Referring to historical debates and theories on vocational education and training (VET) since the 19th century and developments up to the present day, this paper considers the cultural conditions that were relevant for the emergence and legitimisation of vocational education and training and, in particular, the dual principle of apprenticeships in Germany and Switzerland. With reference to the theories of German Vocational Education Theory that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and the concept of vocation (Beruf), i.e. the merging of occupation-based work and education, as it was propagated in particular by Georg Kerschensteiner, the development and establishment of dual vocational training in Germany and Switzerland is reconstructed, in line with what became the institutional framework of apprenticeships in the two countries. It is above all the focus on education in schools through Bildung as a pedagogical concept reaching beyond what may technically be associated with skill formation for jobs, but also the understanding that VET should be given a reliable institutional framework, that were crucial for the emergence and establishment of the modern VET system in both countries.

Recent research in the U.S. links trade-induced job displacement to deaths of despair. Should we expect the same mortality response in developing countries? This paper analyzes the effect of a trade-induced negative shock to manufacturing employment on leading causes of mortality in Mexico between 1998 and 2013. I exploit cross-municipality variation in trade exposure based on differences in industry specialization before China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 to identify labor-demand shocks that are concentrated in manufacturing. I find trade-induced job loss increased mortality from diabetes, raised obesity rates, reduced physical activity, and lowered access to health insurance. These deaths were offset by declines in mortality from ischemic heart disease and chronic pulmonary disease. These findings highlight that negative employment shocks have heterogeneous impacts on mortality in developing countries, where falling incomes lead to less access to health care and nutritious food, but also reduce alcohol and tobacco use.