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”Thanks in Advance”
(2019)
This paper studies the effect of the commonly used phrase “thanks in advance” on compliance with a small request. In a controlled laboratory experiment we ask participants to give a detailed answer to an open question. The treatment variable is whether or not they see the phrase “thanks in advance.” Our participants react to the treatment by exerting less effort in answering the request even though they perceive the phrase as polite.
What Makes an Employer?
(2019)
As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. While human and social capital variables positively influence the hiring decision and the survival as an employer in the same direction, we show that none of the personality traits affect the two outcomes in the same way. Some traits are only relevant for survival as an employer but do not influence the hiring decision, other traits even unfold a revolving door effect, in the sense that employers tend to fail due to the same characteristics that positively influenced their hiring decision.
In 2015, Germany introduced a statutory hourly minimum wage that was not only universally binding but also set at a relatively high level. We discuss the short-run effects of this new minimum wage on a wide set of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and working hours, earnings and wage inequality, dependent and self-employment, as well as reservation wages and satisfaction. We also discuss difficulties in the implementation of the minimum wage and the measurement of its effects related to non-compliance and suitability of data sources. Two years after the minimum wage introduction, the following conclusions can be drawn: while hourly wages increased for low-wage earners, some small negative employment effects are also identifiable. The effects on aspired goals, such as poverty and inequality reduction, have not materialized in the short run. Instead, a tendency to reduce working hours is found, which alleviates the desired positive impact on monthly income. Additionally, the level of non-compliance was substantial in the short run, thus drawing attention to problems when implementing such a wide-reaching policy.
Being ignorant of key aspects of a strategic interaction can represent an advantage rather than a handicap. We study one particular context in which ignorance can be beneficial: iterated strategic interactions in which voluntary cooperation may be sustained into the final round if players voluntarily forego knowledge about the time horizon. We experimentally examine this option to remain ignorant about the time horizon in a finitely repeated two-person prisoners’ dilemma game. We confirm that pairs without horizon knowledge avoid the drop in cooperation that otherwise occurs toward the end of the game. However, this effect is superposed by cooperation declining more rapidly in pairs without horizon knowledge during the middle phase of the game, especially if players do not know that the other player also wanted to remain ignorant of the time horizon.
Mit RISE-DE liegt als FDMentor-Projektergebnis ein Referenzmodell für Strategieprozesse im institutionellen Forschungsdatenmanagement (FDM) vor. RISE-DE bietet einen Bewertungsrahmen zur Selbstevaluation und Zielbestimmung und eignet sich als Werkzeug zur Gestaltung einer strukturierten, Stakeholder-orientierten Strategieentwicklung für das FDM an Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen.
RISE-DE basiert auf dem lose an Reifegradenmodellen orientierten Research Infrastructure Self-Evaluation Framework (RISE v1.1) des Digital Curation Centre (DCC), wurde aber für den Einsatz in partizipativen Prozessen deutlich überarbeitet sowie inhaltlich an den deutschen Wissenschaftskontext und Entwicklungen in der guten Praxis im FDM angepasst. Eine mit Hilfe von RISE-DE erarbeitete Strategie erfüllt zugleich die von der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (HRK) und der League of European Research Universities (LERU) formulierten Empfehlungen.
Die hier vorliegende RISE-DE Version 1.0 nimmt Erfahrungen aus dem Piloteinsatz an der Universität Potsdam sowie Feedback aus der Community auf. Es beinhaltet gegenüber der Vorversion zum einen Veränderungen an den Themen des Referenzmodells, zum anderen wurden Empfehlungen für FDM-Beginner deutlich erweitert und Erläuterungen für die Durchführung partizipativer Strategieprozesse hinzugefügt. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg entstand außerdem ein digitales Evaluations-Tool.
While some pronouncements of expert treaty bodies have been considered ‘key catalysts’ for the development of international human rights law, others are only selectively referred to in legal practice. This article argues that the varying normative impact is due to the informal character of pronouncements. In the absence of treaty provisions specifying their legal effect, practitioners tend to rely on different factors and arguments when either drawing on or rejecting certain pronouncements. Scholars in turn face difficulties when trying to identify explanatory patterns within this diverging practice as the informal character confronts both international lawyers and international relations scholars with their respective methodological ‘blind spots’. In light of these intradisciplinary challenges, this article explores the extent as to which an interdisciplinary approach helps to assess the reasons for the varying impact of pronouncements. After analysing the factors determining their legal significance on the basis of State practice and the academic debate, this article identifies the drafting process as a factor which promises to be particularly insightful when explored from an interdisciplinary perspective and sketches out a framework for future research.
We use panel data from Germany to analyze the effect of population density on urban air pollution (nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and ozone). To address unobserved heterogeneity and omitted variables, we present long difference/fixed effects estimates and instrumental variables estimates, using historical population and soil quality as instruments. Our preferred estimates imply that a one-standard deviation increase in population density increases air pollution by 3-12%.
The German start-up subsidy (SUS) program for the unemployed has recently undergone a major make-over, altering its institutional setup, adding an additional layer of selection and leading to ambiguous predictions of the program’s effectiveness. Using propensity score matching (PSM) as our main empirical approach, we provide estimates of long-term effects of the post-reform subsidy on individual employment prospects and labor market earnings up to 40 months after entering the program. Our results suggest large and persistent long-term effects of the subsidy on employment probabilities and net earned income. These effects are larger than what was estimated for the pre-reform program. Extensive sensitivity analyses within the standard PSM framework reveal that the results are robust to different choices regarding the implementation of the weighting procedure and also with respect to deviations from the conditional independence assumption. As a further assessment of the results’ sensitivity, we go beyond the standard selection-on-observables approach and employ an instrumental variable setup using regional variation in the likelihood of receiving treatment. Here, we exploit the fact that the reform increased the discretionary power of local employment agencies in allocating active labor market policy funds, allowing us to obtain a measure of local preferences for SUS as the program of choice. The results based on this approach give rise to similar estimates. Thus, our results indicating that SUS are still an effective active labor market program after the reform do not appear to be driven by “hidden bias”.
Unfolding the history of one of the oldest human val-ues, the freedom of expression, while defining its limits, is a complicated task. Does freedom stop where hate starts? This very old dilemma is -now more than ever before- revealing new dimensions. Politicians and new laws aim at regulating free expression, while disagree-ments over such regulation gradually become a source of endless conflict in newly formed multicultural, inter-connected, and digitized societies. The example of the Network Enforcement Act is used to understand the idea of restrictive legal practices in Germany, but also to enlighten the fact that law is a human construction which was created in order to regulate communication among individuals. Alternative practices, to straight legal ones, are summarized to show other dimensions of regulating hate speech without involving top-down approaches. The article proposes the approach of re-storative justice as a combination of legal and medita-tive practices in cases of hate speech. One advantage of the restorative justice approach elaborated in this arti-cle is the potential to remedy the inner hate and the pain, both of the victim and perpetrator. Finally, reveal-ing parts of history and new aspects of the ‘hate speech-puzzle’, leads to a questioning of contemporary social structures that possibly generate hate itself.
This paper presents an experiment on the effect of retroactive price-reduction schemes on buyers’ repeated purchase decisions. Such schemes promise buyers a reduced price for all units that are bought in a certain time frame if the total quantity that is purchased passes a given threshold. This study finds a loyalty-enhancing effect of retroactive price-reduction schemes only if the buyers ex-ante expected that entering into the scheme would maximize their monetary gain, but later learn that they should leave the scheme. Furthermore, the effect crucially hinges on the framing of the price reduction.
Getting a Yes
(2019)
This paper studies how the request for a favor has to be devised in order to maximize its chance of success. We present results from a mini-dictator game, in which the recipient can send a free-form text message to the dictator before the latter decides. We find that putting effort into the message, writing in a humorous way and mentioning reasons why the money is needed pays off. Additionally, we find differences in the behavior of male and female dictators. Only men react positively to efficiency arguments, while only women react to messages that emphasize the dictator’s power and responsibility.
A rich literature links knowledge inputs with innovative outputs. However, most of what is known is restricted to manufacturing. This paper analyzes whether the three aspects involving innovative activity - R&D; innovative output; and productivity - hold for knowledge intensive services. Combining the models of Crepon et al. (1998) and of Ackerberg et al. (2015), allows for causal interpretation of the relationship between innovation output and labor productivity. We find that knowledge intensive services benefit from innovation activities in the sense that these activities causally increase their labor productivity. Moreover, the firm size advantage found for manufacturing in previous studies nearly disappears for knowledge intensive services.
Entrepreneurial persistence is demonstrated by an entrepreneur’s continued positive maintenance of entrepreneurial motivation and constantly-renewed active engagement in a new business venture despite counter forces or enticing alternatives. It is thus a crucial factor for entrepreneurs when pursuing and exploiting their business opportunities and to realize potential economic gains and benefits. Using rich data on a representative sample of German business founders, we investigate the determinants of entrepreneurial persistence. Next to observed survival we also construct a hybrid persistence measure capturing also the motivational dimension of persistence. We analyze the influence of individual-level (human capital and personality) and business-related characteristics on both measures as well as their relative importance. We find that the two indicators emphasize different aspects of persistence. For the survival indicator, the predictive power is concentrated in business characteristics and human capital, while for hybrid persistence, the dominant factors are business characteristics and personality. Finally, we show that results are heterogeneous across subgroups. In particular, formerly-unemployed founders do not differ in survival chances, but they are more likely to lack a high psychological commitment to their business ventures.
We estimate the long-term effects of start-up subsidies (SUS) for the unemployed on subjective outcome indicators of well-being, as measured by the participants’ satisfaction in different domains. This extends previous analyses of the current German SUS program (“Gründungszuschuss”) that focused on objective outcomes – such as employment and income – and allows us to make a more complete judgment about the overall effects of SUS at the individual level. This is especially important because subsidizing the transition into self-employment may have unintended adverse effects on participants’ well-being due to its risky nature and lower social security protection, especially in the long run. Having access to linked administrative-survey data providing us with rich information on pre-treatment characteristics, we base our analysis on the conditional independence assumption and use propensity score matching to estimate causal effects within the potential outcomes framework. We find long-term positive effects on job satisfaction but negative effects on individuals’ satisfaction with their social security situation. Further findings suggest that the negative effect on satisfaction with social security may be driven by negative effects on unemployment and retirement insurance coverage. Our heterogeneity analysis reveals substantial variation in effects across gender, age groups and skill levels. The sensitivity analyses show that these findings are highly robust.
From an active labor market policy perspective, start-up subsidies for unemployed individuals are very effective in improving long-term labor market outcomes for participants. From a business perspective, however, the assessment of these public programs is less clear since they might attract individuals with low entrepreneurial abilities and produce businesses with low survival rates and little contribution to job creation, economic growth, and innovation. In this paper, we use a rich data set to compare participants of a German start-up subsidy program for unemployed individuals to a group of regular founders who started from nonunemployment and did not receive the subsidy. The data allows us to analyze their business performance up until 40 months after business formation. We find that formerly subsidized founders lag behind not only in survival and job creation, but especially also in innovation activities. The gaps in these business outcomes are relatively constant or even widening over time. Hence, we do not see any indication of catching up in the longer run. While the gap in survival can be entirely explained by initial differences in observable start-up characteristics, the gap in business development remains and seems to be the result of restricted access to capital as well as differential business strategies and dynamics. Considering these conflicting results for the assessment of the subsidy program from an ALMP and business perspective, policy makers need to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of such a strategy to find the right policy mix.
Auftrag und Möglichkeiten der Kommission für Friedenskonsolidierung im System der Vereinten Nationen
(2019)
Vor dem Hintergrund der international steigenden Zahl an Konfliktrückfällen insbesondere im Anschluss an bereits offiziell für beendet erklärte Bürgerkriege und die daraus folgende zunehmende Relevanz von Peacebuilding-Maßnahmen der internationalen Gemeinschaft, wird in diesem Beitrag die Arbeit der Kommission für Friedenskonsolidierung der Vereinten Nationen untersucht. Einerseits werden hierbei, nach einigen einführenden Erläuterungen zum Begriff der Friedenskonsolidierung an sich sowie der Zusammensetzung und Funktionsweise der Kommission, zunächst ihre einzelnen Aufträge systematisch unter Einordnung in den Kontext des Peacebuilding-Systems der Vereinten Nationen herausgearbeitet und eine auswertende Bilanz unter ihre bisherige Erfüllung gezogen. Daran anschließend erfolgt eine Darstellung der zukünftigen Möglichkeiten der Kommission im Bereich der Friedenskonsolidierung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Potenzials innerhalb des Systems der Vereinten Nationen sowie der einschlägigen völkerrechtlichen Aspekte.
The paper aims to lay out a framework for evaluating value shifts in the international legal order for the purposes of a forthcoming book. In view of current contestations it asks whether we are observing yet another period of norm change (Wandel) or even a more fundamental transformation of international law – a metamorphosis (Verwandlung). For this purpose it suggests to look into the mechanisms of how norms change from the perspective of legal and political science and also to approximate a reference point where change turns into metamorphosis. It submits that such a point may be reached where specific legally protected values are indeed changing (change of legal values) or where the very idea of protecting certain values through law is renounced (delegalizing of values). The paper discusses the benefits of such an interdisciplinary exchange and tries to identify differences and commonalities among both disciplinary perspectives.