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This paper uses a surge in stop and search operations following a high-profile murder to look at their effect on recorded crime. Difference-in-difference estimates using detailed geocoded data at the street-level suggest a doubling to trebling of the number of searches in streets close to the place of the murder. IV estimates on the effects of stops and searches on crime suggest little effect on property crime, weapons offences and violent crime or drug offences. Some specifications find reductions in anti-social behaviour, suggesting that any effects on crime are due to an increased police presence on the streets.

This article combines administrative data on housing transactions with monthly crime data for the years 2014–18 to investigate the link between residential turnover and crime. Using a panel of 34,753 small neighbourhoods in England and Wales as well as street-level data for London, estimates from models with multiple fixed effects suggest that higher turnover is associated with higher overall crime rates. These effects are small and driven by increases in property and violent crime. Using information on price growth, I document differential effects for high-turnover, high price growth (‘attractive’) and high turnover, low price growth (‘declining’) areas.

The decision of the UK to leave the European Union created uncertainty for European citizens resident in the UK for the period 2016–2019. This paper studies the effects of this uncertainty on their mental health. Using data from a large household panel and a difference‐in‐differences framework, we find no evidence for a decline in mental health or life satisfaction for various definitions of EU citizens relative to multiple control groups. These findings are robust to the specific mental health measure. We corroborate this finding by looking at various channels plausibly linking Brexit and European citizens’ mental health.

Sobre un conjunto de datos empresariales representativos de todos los Estados miembros de la Union Europea se analiza la relacion entre diferentes procesos y estructuras institucionales de negociacion colectiva y la evolucion de la productividad laboral. Los resultados muestran efectos de amplio alcance. Algunos procesos y estructuras, en particular los sistemas sin coordinacion entre unidades, parecen menoscabar el rendimiento empresarial, mientras que los sistemas coordinados lo mejoran. En consecuencia, lo importante son los procesos y estructuras institucionales en que se inscribe la negociacion colectiva y no la cuestion de si la negociacion deber ser colectiva o individual.

We study the link between the revelation of a hitherto non-existent occupational risk - mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 - and subsequent worker behaviour. We link occupation-specific data on COVID-19 mortality to individual level data sets. We find that wages did not adjust, but workers started leaving high-risk occupations during 2020. These effects are stronger for workers not affected by lockdowns or working from home orders and for those considered to be clinically vulnerable to COVID-19 and are not driven by negative health shocks or employer-initiated separations. Occupation-level results suggest that employment began to rebound in 2021.

In recent years, individual and company bargaining have increasingly supplanted sector and country collective bargaining leading to increasingly heterogeneous and perforated, i.e. hybrid, national collective bargaining systems. Little is known about the relative effects of these different systems. In this paper the authors derive and test a comprehensive categorization of collective bargaining systems and argue that different systems are associated with different production functions and therefore have different effects on labour productivity. The hypotheses are tested using representative workplace level data for all member states of the European Union. It is found that the performance of coordinated sector collective bargaining systems is higher than for all other forms of collective and individual bargaining. Policy implications of the results are discussed as these results challenge attempts to reform collective bargaining in Europe.

Using representative company level data for all member states of the European Union, we analyze the relationship between different processes and institutional structures of collective bargaining against the development of company labor productivity. Our results clearly show that different processes and institutional structures of collective bargain have very different effects. While show that some processes and structures of collective bargaining ‐ specifically sectorally uncoordinated systems ‐ appear to be detrimental to company performance, the opposite can be said about sectorally coordinated systems. The latter are highly beneficial for economic performance. Thus, what matters are the processes and institutional structures in which collective bargaining is embedded and not the question whether bargaining should be conducted collectively or individually.

This article investigates the link between company closures and political preferences using German panel data. I first show that job loss due to a company closure leads to similar adverse labor market outcomes as those found in other countries. I then show that men become less likely to identify with political parties and mainstream parties in particular, while women become less interested in politics. Effects are stronger for individuals who see job creation and protection as a state responsibility and for lower skilled workers, but do not vary with the routine intensity or offshorability of the former job.

This paper uses street-level data on property sales and crime rates for England and Wales to investigate compensating differentials for crime risk. My identification strategy relies on the use of non-parametric regional time trends on various levels of spatial aggregation as well as various fixed effects for streets and wider areas to control for unobserved amenities and regional economic conditions. The data comes from transaction data collected by the land registry and recently published crime maps for the whole of the UK. My estimates, which are robust to a range of sensible specification changes, suggest that each case of anti-social behaviour per ten population in the same street leads to an approximately 0.6–0.8% drop in property prices, while a corresponding increase in violent crime decreases prices by roughly 0.6–1.6% and a corresponding increase in non-violent crime by about 0.2–0.4%. The majority of estimates are at the upper end of these intervals. Estimates for robbery, burglary and vehicle crime are either zero or positive, but are possibly biased because of reverse causality. Crime outside of the respective street does not appear to matter, which is consistent with earlier findings. Expressed in monetary terms each case of anti-social behaviour costs society between £5000 and £6700 and each violent crime between £5000 and £13,300. The results confirm estimates based on prior willingness-to-pay studies and other studies using smaller areas such as single cities.

This article investigates the link between immigration and property markets in England and Wales. Evidence from fixed effects and shift-share–based instrumental variable regressions suggests that an increase in regional immigration, depending on the specification, either decreases prices at the lower end of the distribution up to the median or leaves them unchanged and has (almost) no effect on mean property prices or prices above the median. The evidence suggests that these findings can be explained through an interaction between the markets for rented and owned properties as well as through changes in the usage of housing space.

Value-added tax (VAT) rebates are a commonly used export-promoting policy. This paper exploits China's frequent adjustments of VAT rebates and large-scale data on export transactions to estimate the effects of VAT rebates on exports. Our difference-in-differences estimations show that the negative adjustments of VAT rebates in our sample period significantly reduce export value and quantity by 15.30% and 19.75%, respectively. This shows that the trade policy of VAT rebates is very effective. We also find that the effect of VAT rebates on exports operating through extensive margins is larger than the effect through intensive margins. Moreover, we find that the pass-through of VAT rebates to importers is around 47%.

Summary We consider two econometric problems when investigating the effect of family size on labour market outcomes using the popular twin birth instrument. The first is the potential for omitted variable bias caused by the fact that fertility treatments are linked to twin births and are typically unobserved. We present estimates that are corrected for this bias and find that it is comparatively small. Second, we show that the effects of twin-birth-induced variation in family size, as well as characteristics of the compliers, varies substantially with time passed since birth, which has consequences for the interpretation of estimates across samples and time.

This paper analyses the effect of major cuts to housing subsidies on property prices in England. Governments commonly give rental subsidies to poor households, but it is not known whether or to what extent this distorts underlying property prices. Using a difference-in-differences-type estimator to exploit variation in scale of the cuts across local areas, we find that the cuts lowered house prices from the time of the policy announcement. The impact was seen predominantly for types of property typically rented by recipients of subsidies and in areas where demand for housing is low relative to supply. Analysis of survey data of individuals finds that benefit recipients were more likely to move home after the cuts relative to other renters. Overall, the results suggest that rental subsidies, while helping recipients to afford otherwise too expensive properties, could contribute to affordability problems for buyers.

This paper investigates the link between cannabis depenalisation and crime using individual-level panel data for England and Wales from 2003 to 2006. We exploit the declassification of cannabis in the UK in 2004 as a natural experiment. Specifically, we use the fact that the declassification changed expected punishments differently in various age groups due to thresholds in British criminal law and employ a difference-in-differences type design using data from the longitudinal version of the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey. Our findings suggest essentially no increases in either cannabis consumption, consumption of other drugs, crime and other forms of risky behaviour.

Summary This paper investigates the gender wage gap among university graduates in their first job and five to six years into their careers using a representative survey among German university graduates. Results from standard decomposition techniques show that up to 83%of an initial 24% earnings disadvantage for women in the first job can be attributed to differences in endowments that are fixed at the time of labor market entry. Of these, fields of study play a dominant role and explain up to 70%of the earnings differential. Adding employer characteristics raises the explained part of the differential to 96%. The importance of unexplained factors increases after five to six years where 40% of the earnings gap remain unexplained even when controlling for detailed experience and employer characteristics.

Using the UK Citizenship Survey for the years 2007–2010, this paper investigates how immigrants view immigration and how these views compare to the views of natives. Immigrants who have been in the UK longer are similar to natives in being opposed to further immigration, while recent immigrants are more in favour of further immigration. Labour market concerns do not play a large role for either immigrants or natives. However, there is some evidence that financial and economic shocks can increase anti-immigration sentiments.

This paper uses variation in victimization probabilities and past victimization between individuals living in the same community to shed new light on the costs of crime. I use panel data from the Mexican Family Life Survey for 2002 and 2005 and look at the impact of within-community differences in victimization risk on changes in (avoidance) behavior and time-allocation. My results from fixed effects and instrumental variable estimations point towards a number of behavioral changes, including individuals arming themselves, with marked gender differences in the reactions of individuals. Crime victims also suffer from sleep deprivation indicating welfare losses.

Summary We use unique rich data for German manufacturing enterprises to investigate the product diversification - firm performance relationship.We find that an increase in the degree of product diversification has a negative impact on profitability when observed and unobserved firm characteristics are controlled for. The effects are statistically significant and large from an economic point of view. This helps to understand the fact that nearly 40 percent of all enterprises with at least 20 employees are single-product firms according to a detailed classification of products, and that multi-product enterprises with a large number of goods are a rare species.

This paper considers two questions on the labour market discrimination against Arab or Muslim men after the recent terrorist attacks. First, I consider for the first time the impact of the September 11 attacks on the wages and working hours of Arabs in Europe. Second, I test whether the fact that a country was the direct target of terrorist attacks influences discrimination using the Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004 and the London bombings on 7 July 2005 as quasi-experimental events. The results indicate that the wages, hours worked and employment probabilities of Arab men were unchanged by the attacks.

This paper investigates whether high regional crime levels lead to a compensating wage differential paid by firms in the respective region. Using data from German social-security records, official police statistics and official statistics for 2003-2006, I consider both violent and non-violent crimes and use three-way error-components estimators to control for individual and regional heterogeneity. The findings suggest that wages are practically unrelated to changes in crime rates. This result is robust over a wide range of subgroups. There is, however, some evidence that crime rates influence land prices. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This paper investigates whether high regional crime levels lead to a compensating wage differential paid by firms in the respective region. Using data from German social-security records, official police statistics and official statistics for 20032006, I consider both violent and non-violent crimes and use three-way error-components estimators to control for individual and regional heterogeneity. The findings suggest that wages are practically unrelated to changes in crime rates. This result is robust over a wide range of subgroups. There is, however, some evidence that crime rates influence land prices.

Summary This paper examines whether the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001 have influenced the job prospects of persons from predominantly Muslim countries in the German labor market. The paper uses a large, representative database of the German working population drawn from administrative sources and forms treatment and control groups based on current nationality. Evidence from regression-adjusted difference-in-differences estimates, estimated by piecewise constant exponential duration models, indicates that 9/11 did not cause a severe decline in job prospects for individuals with a nationality from a predominantly Muslim country. This result is robust when looking at Turks, individuals with a nationality from an Arab country and individuals from Non-Arab, but predominantly Muslim countries relative to a number of control groups. It is also in line with prior evidence from Sweden and England.

Twin births are often used to instrument for fertility when investigating the impact of family size on labor market outcomes. In this paper we consider two econometric problems both related to the link between fertility treatments and multiple births. The first is the potential for omitted variable bias caused by the fact that fertility treatments are typically unobserved. We present estimates corrected for this bias and find it to be comparatively small. Second, we show that the effects of twin-birth induced variation in family size vary substantially with time passed since birth, which has consequences for the interpretation of estimates based on a single cross-section.

In this study, we use a unique rich newly built data set for German manufacturing enterprises to investigate the relationship between product diversification and the stability of sales and employment. We find that contrary to portfolio theoretic considerations, more diversified firms exhibit a higher variability of sales and employment. However, the effects are negligibly small from an economics point of view.

This paper considers the (short-run) employment and wage effects of the 2004 EU enlargement on firms located close to Germany's eastern border. We use a 50% sample of Germans plants and apply difference-in-differences estimators combined with a matching approach. We evaluate changes in total employment, the employment shares of low-skilled and East European workers and the wages for low-skilled, skilled and high-skilled workers in various sectors. Our results suggest basically no short-run employment effects of the EU enlargement except for firms active in wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants. We also find some evidence for a stronger employment of East European workers in almost all border firms, although the effects are quantitatively small. Negative wage effects are only found for skilled workers in consulting, research and related activities. This paper considers the (short-run) employment and wage effects of the2004 EU enlargement on firms located close to Germany’s eastern border. We use a 50% sample of Germans plants and apply difference-in-differences estimatorscombined with a matching approach. We evaluate changes in total employment, theemployment shares of low-skilled and East European workers and the wages forlow-skilled, skilled and high-skilled workers in various sectors. Our results suggestbasically no short-run employment effects of the EU enlargement except for firmsactive in wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants. We also find someevidence for a stronger employment of East European workers in almost all borderfirms, although the effects are quantitatively small. Negative wage effects are onlyfound for skilled workers in consulting, research and related activities.

I exploit exogenous variation in the likelihood to obtain any sort of educational qualification between January- and February-born individuals for 13 academic cohorts in England. For these cohorts compulsory schooling laws interacted with the timing of the CSE and O-level exams to change the probability of obtaining a qualification by around 2–3 percentage points. I then use data on individuals born in these two months from the British Labour Force Survey and the Health Survey for England to investigate the effects of education on health using being February-born as an instrument for education. The results indicate neither an effect of education on various health related measures nor an effect on health related behaviour, e.g., smoking, drinking or eating various types of food.

Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for 2006, I test recent theoretical predictions on social comparisons influencing individual Body Mass Index (BMI). I find that in particular the average BMI of individuals in the same county-age-gender-cell as the respective individual influences BMI. Evidence from quantile regressions points towards significant heterogeneity of effects along the distribution. However, there is no evidence of some individuals becoming slimmer as a result of preferences for deviant behaviour. Life satisfaction regressions show a positive effect for BMI relative to the county average. Paradoxically, BMI relative to the cell average seems to have no effect on life satisfaction. These two results contradict most theories of social comparisons.

I exploit exogenous changes in school year length in Germany in 1966 and 1967 to study the causal effect of education on health. Controlling for cohort, school track and Federal states fixed effects, which fully control for the assignment into treatment, reveals no differences in body weight, mental or physical health between affected and non-affected individuals. Additional robustness checks suggest that selection effects of individuals into non-affected Federal states play no role.

We consider the impact of the 2004 EU enlargement on enterprise performance and the exporting behavior of German service enterprises in Germany’s eastern border region. Our results from regression adjusted difference-in-differences estimators combined with matching and panel data from official statistics suggest that the EU enlargement had a negative impact on the turnover and export intensity of large enterprises in the border region. For small enterprises, we find an annual increase in turnover by 2.3% in 2004 and an annual decrease in profitability by 1.5 and 1.9 percentage points in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

Summary This paper investigates the gender wage gap among skilled German workers after the end of vocational training using data from social security records. Using information on worker and plant characteristics for the training plant, results from standard decomposition techniques show that up to 92% of an initial 14% earnings disadvantage for women in the first job can be attributed to differences in endowments. Of these, occupational segregation explains up to two thirds of the earnings gap, with plant characteristics accounting for about 25%.

This paper provides first evidence on the social returns to education from both firm-level and regional human capital. Using panel data from German social security, both at an individual and aggregated at the plant and regional level, I estimate earnings functions incorporating measures of regional and firm-level human capital while controlling for various types of unobserved heterogeneity, demand shocks, regional physical capital and other regional and firm-level confounders. The results suggest negligibly small external returns to the firm-level shares of high-skilled workers. On the regional level, the results show no support for external returns to education, except for skilled workers.

This paper provides first evidence on the anatomy of human capital externalities arising from both firm-level and regional human capital. Using panel data from German social security records, both at an individual and aggregated at the plant and regional level, I estimate earnings functions incorporating measures of regional and firm-level human capital while controlling for various types of unobserved heterogeneity. The results suggest that the firm-level share of high-skilled workers generates positive, although small social returns to education for low-skilled and skilled workers but not for the high-skilled. This finding is in line with learning based theories of human capital externalities. Some estimates also suggest negative social returns for the regional shares of low-skilled workers. No such effects are found for the firm-level shares of low-skilled workers and the regional shares of high-skilled workers.

We consider the impact of the 2004 EU-enlargement on enterprise performance and the exporting behavior of German service enterprises in Germany’s eastern border region. Our results from regression adjusted difference-in-differences-estimators combined with matching and panel data from official statistics suggest that the EU-enlargement resulted in a decline by circa 1 percent in the turnover and the profitability of large enterprises in the border region, respectively. For small enterprises, we find an annual increase in turnover by 2.7% in both 2004 and 2005 and an annual decrease in profitability by 1.8 and 2.6 percentage points in 2004 and 2005 respectively.

This paper considers the impact of adverse health shocks that hit an individual’s partner on subjective well-being. Using data on couples from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1984 to 2006, I compare the losses in well-being caused by own and spousal disability using panel-regressions. I find that women and to a lesser extent men are harmed by spousal disability which is consistent with the existence of other-regarding preferences within couples. The magnitude of effects suggests that spousal disability is about one quarter to one half as harmful as individual disability with larger effects being found for women.

This paper shows that differences in various non-cognitive traits, specifically the "big five", positive and negative reciprocity, locus of control and risk aversion, contribute to gender inequalities in wages and employment. Using the 2004 and 2005 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel, evidence from regression and decomposition techniques suggests that gender differences in psychological traits are more important for inequalities in wages than in employment. Differences in the "big five", in particular in agreeableness, conscientiousness and neurocitism matter for both wages and employment. For the latter, the results also show a large effect of differences in external locus of control.

This paper shows that differences in various non-cognitive traits, specifically the “big five”, positive and negative reciprocity, locus of control and risk aversion, contribute to gender inequalities in wages and employment. Using the 2004 and 2005 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel, evidence from regression and decomposition techniques suggests that gender differences in psychological traits are more important for inequalities in wages than in employment. Differences in the “big five”, in particular in agreeableness, conscientiousness and neurocitism matter for both wages and employment. For the latter, the results also show a large effect of differences in external locus of control.

We use a unique rich newly built data set for German manufacturing enterprises to investigate the product differentiation – firm performance relationship. We find that an increase in the degree of product diversification has a negative impact on profitability when observed and unobserved firm characteristics are controlled for. The effects are statistically significant and large from an economic point of view. This helps to understand the – at least, at a first glance – surprising fact that nearly 40 percent of all manufacturing enterprises with at least 20 employees in Germany are singleproduct firms according to a detailed classification of products, and that multi-product enterprises with a large number of goods are a rare species.

This paper considers the impact of tobacco consumption on wages in the UK using data from fifteen waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Considering both overall smoker status as well as the number of cigarettes consumed, we provide estimates for the smoking wage penalty using standard regression methods, including panel estimators for fixed effects and panel instrumental variable estimators. Furthermore, we analyse the impact of stopping and starting to smoke relative to permanent smokers and non-smokers by Mahalanobis-matching. In the cross-section, we find a rather large wage penalty for smokers of about 4%. However, panel estimator and IV results show relatively few support for hypotheses linking the smoking wage penalty to either lower productivity of smokers, be it health related or not, or discrimination. Matching results suggest that starting or stopping to smoke does not affect later earnings relative to remaining either smoker or non-smoker.

This paper investigates whether high regional crime levels lead to a compensating wage differential paid by firms in the respective region. Using data from German social security records and official police statistics for 2003 to 2006, we consider both violent and non-violent crimes and use three-way error-components estimators to control for individual and regional heterogeneity. Our findings suggest a positive and rather large compensating differential for the risk of falling victim to a violent crime while no such effect exists for other criminal activities. However, our results also suggest that the wage effects for most individuals are rather small due to small variation in the crime rates.

This paper investigates the gender wage gap among German university graduates in their first job and five to six years into their careers. We find that women earn about 30% less than men at their first job and about 35% less after five to six years. Results from standard decomposition techniques show that 80% of the earnings gap in the first job can be attributed to differences in endowment of which between 74 and 78% are related to different fields of studies. Adding employer information leads to an explained share of about 90% of the earnings gap with fields of study still accounting for about half of the gap. These also play a dominant role in a model without employer information after five to six years, directly explaining between 26 and 33% of the earnings gap. Adding employer information, however, leads to insignificant results. Together with detailed information on experiences after graduation, these variables account for about 44 to 50% of the earnings gap later in the graduates careers.

Die vorliegende Längsschnittuntersuchung der BA-geförderten Gründungskohorte des zweiten Halbjahres 2003 im Agenturbezirk Uelzen vergleicht mittels einer schriftlichen Befragung drei Jahre nach Gründungsbeginn schwerpunktmäßig ÜG- und ExGZ-Gründungen hinsichtlich erfolgsbezogener Merkmale. Zusätzlich werden die im Rahmen der Befragung erhobenen Informationen zur Gründungsmotivation, Gründungsvorbereitung, den finanziellen Rahmenbedingungen und der Bedeutung bestimmter Förderbedingungen für die Gründer ausgewertet. Bei einer Rücklaufquote von ca. 19 Prozent liegen 32 verwertbare ÜG- und 43 ExGZ-Fragebögen vor. Zur Überprüfung der Unterschiede von ÜG- und ExGZ-Gründungen werden T-Tests genutzt. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen erneut das Vorliegen einiger signifikanter Unterschiede zwischen ÜG- und ExGZGründungen.

Dieses Papier päsentiert deskriptive Evidenz zur Struktur von Ich-AG-Gründungen und Gründern aus dem Arbeitsagenturbezirk Lüneburg. Die Ergebnisse basieren auf einer Befragung aller Gründer, die zwischen Juni 2004 und Februar 2005 selbstständig geworden sind und von der Arbeitsagentur Lüneburg gefördert wurden.

This paper uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel of the years 2000 to 2005 to study the earnings differential between self- and dependent employed German men. Constructing a counterfactual earnings distribution for the self-employed German dependant employment and using quantile regression decompositions we find that the earnings differential over the distribution cannot be explained by differences in endowments. Furthermore, low-earning self-employed could earn more in dependent employment. Finally, the observed earnings advantage for the self-employed at the top of the earnings distribution os not associated with higher returns to observable variables.

This paper examines whether the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001 have influence on the job prospects of Arabs in the German labor market. Using a large, representative database of the German working population, the attacks are treated as a natural experiment that may have caused an exogenous shift in attitudes toward persons who are perceived to be Arabs. Evidence from regression-adjusted difference-in-differences-estimates indicates the 9/11 did not cause a severe decline in job prospects. This result is robust over a wide range of control groups and several definitions of the sample and the observation period. Several explanations for this result, which is in line with prior evidence from Sweden, are offered.