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Essays in labor economics
(2022)
This thesis offers insights into the process of workers decisions to invest into work-related training. Specifically, the role of personality traits and attitudes is analysed. The aim is to understand whether such traits contribute to an under-investment into training. Importantly, general and specific training are distinguished, where the worker’s productivity increases in many firms in the former and only in the current firm in the latter case. Additionally, this thesis contributes to the evaluation of the German minimum wage introduction in 2015, identifying causal effects on wages and working hours.
Chapters two to four focus on the work-related training decision. First, individuals with an internal locus of control see a direct link between their own actions and their labor market success, while external individuals connect their outcomes to fate, luck, and other people. Consequently, it can be expected that internal individuals expect higher returns to training and are, thus, more willing to participate. The results reflect this hypothesis with internal individuals being more likely to participate in general (but not specific) training. Second, training can be viewed either as a risky investment or as an insurance against negative labor income shocks. In both cases, risk attitudes are expected to play a role in the decision process. The data point towards risk seeking individuals being more likely to participate in general (but not specific) training, and thus, training being viewed on average as a risky investment. Third, job satisfaction influences behavioral decisions in the job context, where dissatisfied workers may react by neglecting their duties, improving the situation or quitting the job. In the first case, dissatisfied workers are expected to invest less in training, while the latter two reactions could lead to higher participation rates amongst dissatisfied workers. The results suggest that on average dissatisfied workers are less likely to invest into training than satisfied workers. However, closer inspections of quit intentions and different sources of dissatisfaction paint less clear pictures, pointing towards the complexity of the job satisfaction construct.
Chapters five and six evaluate the introduction of the minimum wage in Germany in 2015. First, in 2015 an increase in the growth of hourly wages can be identified as a causal effect of the minimum wage introduction. However, at the same time, a reduction in the weekly working hours results in an overall unchanged growth in monthly earnings. When considering the effects in 2016, the decrease in weekly working hours disappears, resulting in a significant increase in the growth of monthly earnings due to the minimum wage. Importantly, the analysis suggests that the increase in hourly wages was not sufficient to ensure all workers receiving the minimum wage. This points to non-compliance being an issue in the first years after the minimum wage introduction.
There are numerous situations in which people ask for something or make a request, e.g. asking a favor, asking for help or requesting compliance with specific norms. For this reason, how to ask for something in order to increase people’s willingness to fulfill such requests is one of the most important question for many people working in various different fields of responsibility such as charitable giving, marketing, management or policy making.
This dissertation consists of four chapters that deal with the effects of small changes in the decision-making environment on altruistic decision-making and compliance behavior. Most notably, written communication as an influencing factor is the focus of the first three chapters. The starting point was the question how to devise a request in order to maximize its chance of success (Chapter 1). The results of the first chapter originate the ideas for the second and third chapter. Chapter 2 analyzes how communication by a neutral third-party, i.e. a text from the experimenters that either reminds potential benefactors of their responsibility or highlights their freedom of choice, affects altruistic decision-making. Chapter 3 elaborates on the effect of thanking people in advance when asking them for help. While being not as closely related to the other chapters as the three first ones are, the fourth chapter deals as well with the question how compliance (here: compliance with norms and rules) is affected by subtle manipulations of the environment in which decisions are made. This chapter analyzes the effect of default settings in a tax return on tax compliance.
In order to study the research questions outlined above, controlled experiments were conducted. Chapter 1, which analyzes the effect of text messages on the decision to give something to another person, employs a mini-dictator game. The recipient sends a free-form text message to the dictator before the latter makes a binary decision whether or not to give part of her or his endowment to the recipient. We find that putting effort into the message by writing a long note without spelling mistakes increases dictators’ willingness to give. Moreover, writing in a humorous way and mentioning reasons why the money is needed pays off. Furthermore, men and women seem to react differently to some message categories. Only men react positively to efficiency arguments, while only women react to messages that emphasize the dictator’s power and responsibility.
Building on this last result, Chapter 2 attempts to disentangle the effect of reminding potential benefactors of their responsibility for the potential beneficiary and the effect of highlighting their decision power and freedom of choice on altruistic decision-making by studying the effects of two different texts on giving in a dictator game. We find that only men react positively to a text that stresses their responsibility for the recipient by giving more to her or him, whereas only women seem to react positively to a text that emphasizes their decision power and freedom of choice.
Chapter 3 focuses on the compliance with a request. In the experiment, participants are asked to provide a detailed answer to an open question. Compliance is measured by the effort participants spend on answering the question. The treatment variable is whether or not they see the text “thanks in advance.” We find that participants react negatively by putting less effort into complying with the request in response to the phrase “thanks in advance.”
Chapter 4 studies the effect of prefilled tax returns with mostly inaccurate default values on tax compliance. In a laboratory experiment, participants earn income by performing a real-effort task and must subsequently file a tax return for three consecutive rounds. In the main treatment, the tax return is prefilled with a default value, resulting from participants’ own performance in previous rounds, which varies in its relative size. The results suggest that there is no lasting effect of a default value on tax honesty, neither for relatively low nor relatively high defaults. However, participants who face a default that is lower than their true income in the first round evade significantly and substantially more taxes in this round than participants in the control treatment without a default.
The present dissertation conducts empirical research on the relationship between urban life and its economic costs, especially for the environment. On the one hand, existing gaps in research on the influence of population density on air quality are closed and, on the other hand, innovative policy measures in the transport sector are examined that are intended to make metropolitan areas more sustainable. The focus is on air pollution, congestion and traffic accidents, which are important for general welfare issues and represent significant cost factors for urban life. They affect a significant proportion of the world's population. While 55% of the world's people already lived in cities in 2018, this share is expected to reach approximately 68% by 2050.
The four self-contained chapters of this thesis can be divided into two sections: Chapters 2 and 3 provide new causal insights into the complex interplay between urban structures and air pollution. Chapters 4 and 5 then examine policy measures to promote non-motorised transport and their influence on air quality as well as congestion and traffic accidents.
Modern health care systems are characterized by pronounced prevention and cost-optimized treatments. This dissertation offers novel empirical evidence on how useful such measures can be. The first chapter analyzes how radiation, a main pollutant in health care, can negatively affect cognitive health. The second chapter focuses on the effect of Low Emission Zones on public heath, as air quality is the major external source of health problems. Both chapters point out potentials for preventive measures. Finally, chapter three studies how changes in treatment prices affect the reallocation of hospital resources. In the following, I briefly summarize each chapter and discuss implications for health care systems as well as other policy areas. Based on the National Educational Panel Study that is linked to data on radiation, chapter one shows that radiation can have negative long-term effects on cognitive skills, even at subclinical doses. Exploiting arguably exogenous variation in soil contamination in Germany due to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the findings show that people exposed to higher radiation perform significantly worse in cognitive tests 25 years later. Identification is ensured by abnormal rainfall within a critical period of ten days. The results show that the effect is stronger among older cohorts than younger cohorts, which is consistent with radiation accelerating cognitive decline as people get older. On average, a one-standarddeviation increase in the initial level of CS137 (around 30 chest x-rays) is associated with a decrease in the cognitive skills by 4.1 percent of a standard deviation (around 0.05 school years). Chapter one shows that sub-clinical levels of radiation can have negative consequences even after early childhood. This is of particular importance because most of the literature focuses on exposure very early in life, often during pregnancy. However, population exposed after birth is over 100 times larger. These results point to substantial external human capital costs of radiation which can be reduced by choices of medical procedures. There is a large potential for reductions because about one-third of all CT scans are assumed to be not medically justified (Brenner and Hall, 2007). If people receive unnecessary CT scans because of economic incentives, this chapter points to additional external costs of health care policies. Furthermore, the results can inform the cost-benefit trade-off for medically indicated procedures. Chapter two provides evidence about the effectiveness of Low Emission Zones. Low Emission Zones are typically justified by improvements in population health. However, there is little evidence about the potential health benefits from policy interventions aiming at improving air quality in inner-cities. The chapter ask how the coverage of Low Emission Zones air pollution and hospitalization, by exploiting variation in the roll out of Low Emission Zones in Germany. It combines information on the geographic coverage of Low Emission Zones with rich panel data on the universe of German hospitals over the period from 2006 to 2016 with precise information on hospital locations and the annual frequency of detailed diagnoses. In order to establish that our estimates of Low Emission Zones’ health impacts can indeed be attributed to improvements in local air quality, we use data from Germany’s official air pollution monitoring system and assign monitor locations to Low Emission Zones and test whether measures of air pollution are affected by the coverage of a Low Emission Zone. Results in chapter two confirm former results showing that the introduction of Low Emission Zones improved air quality significantly by reducing NO2 and PM10 concentrations. Furthermore, the chapter shows that hospitals which catchment areas are covered by a Low Emission Zone, diagnose significantly less air pollution related diseases, in particular by reducing the incidents of chronic diseases of the circulatory and the respiratory system. The effect is stronger before 2012, which is consistent with a general improvement in the vehicle fleet’s emission standards. Depending on the disease, a one-standard-deviation increase in the coverage of a hospitals catchment area covered by a Low Emission Zone reduces the yearly number of diagnoses up to 5 percent. These findings have strong implications for policy makers. In 2015, overall costs for health care in Germany were around 340 billion euros, of which 46 billion euros for diseases of the circulatory system, making it the most expensive type of disease caused by 2.9 million cases (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2017b). Hence, reductions in the incidence of diseases of the circulatory system may directly reduce society’s health care costs. Whereas chapter one and two study the demand-side in health care markets and thus preventive potential, chapter three analyzes the supply-side. By exploiting the same hospital panel data set as in chapter two, chapter three studies the effect of treatment price shocks on the reallocation of hospital resources in Germany. Starting in 2005, the implementation of the German-DRG-System led to general idiosyncratic treatment price shocks for individual hospitals. Thus far there is little evidence of the impact of general price shocks on the reallocation of hospital resources. Additionally, I add to the exiting literature by showing that price shocks can have persistent effects on hospital resources even when these shocks vanish. However, simple OLS regressions would underestimate the true effect, due to endogenous treatment price shocks. I implement a novel instrument variable strategy that exploits the exogenous variation in the number of days of snow in hospital catchment areas. A peculiarity of the reform allowed variation in days of snow to have a persistent impact on treatment prices. I find that treatment price increases lead to increases in input factors such as nursing staff, physicians and the range of treatments offered but to decreases in the treatment volume. This indicates supplier-induced demand. Furthermore, the probability of hospital mergers and privatization decreases. Structural differences in pre-treatment characteristics between hospitals enhance these effects. For instance, private and larger hospitals are more affected. IV estimates reveal that OLS results are biased towards zero in almost all dimensions because structural hospital differences are correlated with the reallocation of hospital resources. These results are important for several reasons. The G-DRG-Reform led to a persistent polarization of hospital resources, as some hospitals were exposed to treatment price increases, while others experienced reductions. If hospitals increase the treatment volume as a response to price reductions by offering unnecessary therapies, it has a negative impact on population wellbeing and public spending. However, results show a decrease in the range of treatments if prices decrease. Hospitals might specialize more, thus attracting more patients. From a policy perspective it is important to evaluate if such changes in the range of treatments jeopardize an adequate nationwide provision of treatments. Furthermore, the results show a decrease in the number of nurses and physicians if prices decrease. This could partly explain the nursing crisis in German hospitals. However, since hospitals specialize more they might be able to realize efficiency gains which justify reductions in input factors without loses in quality. Further research is necessary to provide evidence for the impact of the G-DRG-Reform on health care quality. Another important aspect are changes in the organizational structure. Many public hospitals have been privatized or merged. The findings show that this is at least partly driven by the G-DRG-Reform. This can again lead to a lack in services offered in some regions if merged hospitals specialize more or if hospitals are taken over by ecclesiastical organizations which do not provide all treatments due to moral conviction. Overall, this dissertation reveals large potential for preventive health care measures and helps to explain reallocation processes in the hospital sector if treatment prices change. Furthermore, its findings have potentially relevant implications for other areas of public policy. Chapter one identifies an effect of low dose radiation on cognitive health. As mankind is searching for new energy sources, nuclear power is becoming popular again. However, results of chapter one point to substantial costs of nuclear energy which have not been accounted yet. Chapter two finds strong evidence that air quality improvements by Low Emission Zones translate into health improvements, even at relatively low levels of air pollution. These findings may, for instance, be of relevance to design further policies targeted at air pollution such as diesel bans. As pointed out in chapter three, the implementation of DRG-Systems may have unintended side-effects on the reallocation of hospital resources. This may also apply to other providers in the health care sector such as resident doctors.
Inequalities in health are a prevalent feature of societies. And as societies, we condemn inequalities that are rooted in immutable circumstances such as gender, race, and parental background. Consequently, policy makers are interested in measuring and understanding the causes of health inequalities rooted in circumstances. However, identifying causal estimates of these relationships is very ambitious for reasons such as the presence of confounders or measurement error in the data. This thesis contributes to this ambitious endeavour by addressing these challenges in four chapters.
In the first Chapter, I use 25 years of rich health information to describe three features of intergenerational health mobility in Germany. First, we describe the joint permanent health distribution of the parents and their children. A ten percentile increase in parental permanent health is associated with a 2.3 percentile increase in their child’s health. Second, a percentile point increase in permanent health ranks is associated with a 0.8% to 1.4% increase in permanent income for, both, children, and parents, respectively. Non-linearities in the association between permanent health and income create incentives to escape the bottom of the permanent health distribution. Third, upward mobility in permanent health varies with parental socio-economic status.
In the second Chapter, we estimate the effect of maternal schooling on children’s mental health in adulthood. Using the Socio-Economic Panel and the mental health measure based on the SF-12 questionnaire, we exploit a compulsory schooling law reform to identify the causal effect of maternal schooling on children’s mental health. While the theoretical considerations are not clear, we do not find that the mother’s schooling has an effect on the mental health of the children. However, we find a positive effect on children’s physical health operating mainly through physical functioning. In addition, albeit with the absence of a reduced-form effect on mental health, we find evidence that the number of friends moderates the relationship between maternal schooling and their children’s mental health.
In the third Chapter, against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity design in time to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences.
In the last Chapter of this thesis, we investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed – particularly women– in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are 35% more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. We do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, e.g., the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship.
This thesis offers new insights on the effects of Start-Up Subsidies (SUS) for unemployed individuals as a special kind of active labor market program (ALMP) that aims to re-integrate individuals into the labor market via the route of self-employment. Moreover, this thesis contributes to the literature on methods for causal inference when the treatment variable is continuous rather than binary. For example, this is the case when individuals differ in their degree of exposure to a common treatment.
The analysis of the effects of SUS focuses on the main current German program called “Gründungszuschuss” (New Start-Up Subsidy, NSUS) after its reform in 2011. Average Effects on participants' labor market outcomes - as measured by employment and earnings - as well as subjective well-being are estimated mainly based on propensity score matching (PSM) techniques. PSM aims to achieve balance in terms of observed characteristics by matching participants with at least one comparable non-participant in terms of their probability to receive the treatment. This estimation strategy is valid as long as all relevant characteristics that explain selection patterns into treatment are observed and included in the estimation of the propensity score. To make our analysis as credible as possible, we control for a large vector of characteristics as observed through the combination of rich administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency as well as through survey data.
Chapters two to four of this thesis puts special emphasis on aspects regarding (the evaluation of) SUS programs that have received no or only limited attention thus far. The first aspect relates to the interplay of institutional details of the program and its effectiveness. So far, relatively little is known about the importance of SUS program features such as the duration of support. Second, there is no experimental benchmark evaluation of SUS available and thus, the reliability of non-experimental estimation techniques such as PSM is of crucial importance as estimates are biased when relevant confounders are omitted from the analysis. Third, there may be potentially detrimental effects of transitioning into (relatively risky) self-employment on subjective well-being among subsidized founders out of unemployment. These were to remain undetected if the analysis would focus exclusively on labor market outcomes of participants. The results indicate positive long-term effects of SUS participation on employment and earnings among participants. These effects are substantially larger than what estimated before the reform, indicating room for improvement in program design via changes in institutional details. Moreover, non-experimental estimates of treatment effects are remarkably robust to hidden confounding. Regarding subjective well-being, this thesis finds a positive long-run impact on job satisfaction and a detrimental effect on satisfaction with social security. The latter appears to be driven by adverse effects on social insurance contributions.
In chapter five, a novel automated covariate balancing technique for the estimation of causal effects in the context of continuous treatments is derived and assessed regarding its performance compared to other (automated) balancing techniques. Although binary research designs that only differentiate between participants and non-participants of some treatment remain the most-common case in empirical practice, many applications can be adapted to include continuous treatments as well. Often, this will allow for more meaningful estimates of causal effects in order to further improve the design of programs. In the context of SUS, one may further investigate the effects of the size of monetary support or its duration on participants' labor market outcomes. Both Monte-Carlo investigations and analysis of two well-known datasets suggests superior performance of the proposed Entropy Balancing for continuous treatments (EBCT) compared to other existing estimation strategies.
On January 1, 2015, Germany introduced a general statutory minimum wage of €8.50 gross per hour. This thesis analyses the effects of the minimum wage introduction in Germany as well as wage floors in the European context, contributing to national and international research.
The second chapter of this dissertation summarizes the short-run effects of the minimum wage reform found in previous studies.
We show that the introduction of the minimum wage had a positive effect on wages at the bottom of the distribution. Yet, there was still a significant amount of non-compliance shortly after the reform. Additionally, previous evidence points to small negative employment effects mainly driven by a reduction in mini-jobs. Contrary to expectations, though, there were no effects on poverty and general inequality found in the short run. This is mostly due to the fact that working hours were reduced and the increase of hourly wages was therefore not reflected in monthly wages.
The third chapter identifies whether the job losses predicted in ex-ante studies materialized in the short run and, if so, which type of employment was affected the most. To identify the effects, this chapter (as well as chapter four) uses a regional difference-in-difference approach to estimate the effects on regular employment (part- and full-time) and mini-jobs.
Our results suggest that the minimum wage has slightly reduced overall employment, mainly due to a decline in mini-jobs.
The fourth chapter has the same methodological approach as the previous one. Its motivated by the fact that women are often overrepresented among low-wage employees. Thus, the primary research question in this chapter is whether the minimum wage has led to a narrowing of the gender wage gap. In order to answer that, we identify the effects on the wage gap at the 10th and 25th percentiles and at the mean of the underlying gender-specific wage distributions. Our results imply that for eligible employees the gender wage gap at the 10th percentile decreased by 4.6 percentage points between 2014 and 2018 in high-bite regions compared to low-bite regions. We estimate this to be a reduction of 32% compared to 2014. Higher up the distribution – i.e. at the 25th percentile and the mean – the effects are smaller and not as robust.
The fifth chapter keeps the gender-specific emphasis on minimum wage effects. However, in contrast to the rest of the dissertation, it widens the scope to other European Union countries. Following the rationale of the previous chapter, women could potentially benefit particularly from a minimum wage. However, they could also be more prone to suffer from the possibly induced job losses or reductions in working hours. Therefore, this chapter summarizes existing evidence from EU member states dealing with the relationship between wage floors and the gender wage gap. In addition, it provides a systematic summary of studies that examine the impact of minimum wages on employment losses or changes in working hours that particularly affect women. The evidence shows that higher wage floors are often associated with smaller gender wage gaps. With respect to employment, women do not appear to experience greater employment losses than men per se. However, studies show that the minimum wage has a particular impact on part-time workers. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that the negative correlation between the minimum wage and the gender wage gap is related to the job losses of these lower-paid, often female, part-time workers. This working arrangement should therefore be specially focused on in the context of minimum wages.