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Using novel longitudinal data, this paper studies the short- and medium-term effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 on social trust of adolescents in Germany. Comparing adolescents who responded to our survey shortly before the start of the war with those who responded shortly after the conflict began and applying difference-in-differences (DiD) models over time, we find a significant decline in the outcome after the war started. These findings provide new evidence on how armed conflicts influence social trust and well-being among young people in a country not directly involved in the war.
Residential segregation is a wide-spread phenomenon that can be observed in almost every major city.
In these urban areas residents with different racial or socioeconomic background tend to form homogeneous clusters.
Schelling's famous agent-based model for residential segregation explains how such clusters can form even if all agents are tolerant, i.e., if they agree to live in mixed neighborhoods.
For segregation to occur, all it needs is a slight bias towards agents preferring similar neighbors.
Very recently, Schelling's model has been investigated from a game-theoretic point of view with selfish agents that strategically select their residential location.
In these games, agents can improve on their current location by performing a location swap with another agent who is willing to swap.
We significantly deepen these investigations by studying the influence of the underlying topology modeling the residential area on the existence of equilibria, the Price of Anarchy and on the dynamic properties of the resulting strategic multi-agent system. Moreover, as a new conceptual contribution, we also consider the influence of locality, i.e., if the location swaps are restricted to swaps of neighboring agents.
We give improved almost tight bounds on the Price of Anarchy for arbitrary underlying graphs and we present (almost) tight bounds for regular graphs, paths and cycles. Moreover, we give almost tight bounds for grids, which are commonly used in empirical studies.
For grids we also show that locality has a severe impact on the game dynamics.
In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern was that her decision would signal an open-door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus further increasing migration to Germany and making the country permanently more attractive to irregular and humanitarian migrants. This ‘pull-effect’ hypothesis has been a mainstay of policy discussions ever since. With the continued global rise in forced displacement, not appearing welcoming to migrants has become a guiding principle for the asylum policy of many large receiving countries. In this article, we exploit the unique case study that Merkel's 2015 decision provides for answering the fundamental question of whether welcoming migration policies have sustained effects on migration towards destination countries. We analyze an extensive range of data on migration inflows, migration aspirations and online search interest between 2000 and 2020. The results reject the ‘pull effect’ hypothesis while reaffirming states’ capacity to adapt to changing contexts and regulate migration.
Background
Many high-income countries are grappling with severe labour shortages in the healthcare sector. Refugees and recent migrants present a potential pool for staff recruitment due to their higher unemployment rates, younger age, and lower average educational attainment compared to the host society's labour force. Despite this, refugees and recent migrants, often possessing limited language skills in the destination country, are frequently excluded from traditional recruitment campaigns conducted solely in the host country’s language. Even those with intermediate language skills may feel excluded, as destination-country language advertisements are perceived as targeting only native speakers. This study experimentally assesses the effectiveness of a recruitment campaign for nursing positions in a German care facility, specifically targeting Arabic and Ukrainian speakers through Facebook advertisements.
Methods
We employ an experimental design (AB test) approximating a randomized controlled trial, utilizing Facebook as the delivery platform. We compare job advertisements for nursing positions in the native languages of Arabic and Ukrainian speakers (treatment) with the same advertisements displayed in German (control) for the same target group in the context of a real recruitment campaign for nursing jobs in Berlin, Germany. Our evaluation includes comparing link click rates, visits to the recruitment website, initiated applications, and completed applications, along with the unit cost of these indicators. We assess statistical significance in group differences using the Chi-squared test.
Results
We find that recruitment efforts in the origin language were 5.6 times (Arabic speakers) and 1.9 times (Ukrainian speakers) more effective in initiating nursing job applications compared to the standard model of German-only advertisements among recent migrants and refugees. Overall, targeting refugees and recent migrants was 2.4 (Ukrainians) and 10.8 (Arabic) times cheaper than targeting the reference group of German speakers indicating higher interest among these groups.
Conclusions
The results underscore the substantial benefits for employers in utilizing targeted recruitment via social media aimed at foreign-language communities within the country. This strategy, which is low-cost and low effort compared to recruiting abroad or investing in digitalization, has the potential for broad applicability in numerous high-income countries with sizable migrant communities. Increased employment rates among underemployed refugee and migrant communities, in turn, contribute to reducing poverty, social exclusion, public expenditure, and foster greater acceptance of newcomers within the receiving society.
‘Modern talking’
(2024)
Despite growing interest, we lack a clear understanding of how the arguably ambiguous phenomenon of agile is perceived in government practice. This study aims to alleviate this puzzle by investigating how managers and employees in German public sector organisations make sense of agile as a spreading management fashion in the form of narratives. This is important because narratives function as innovation carriers that ultimately influence the manifestations of the concept in organisations. Based on a multi-case study of 31 interviews and 24 responses to a qualitative online survey conducted in 2021 and 2022, we provide insights into what public sector managers, employees and consultants understand (and, more importantly, do not understand) as agile and how they weave it into their existing reality of bureaucratic organisations. We uncover three meta-narratives of agile government, which we label ‘renew’, ‘complement’ and ‘integrate’. In particular, the meta-narratives differ in their positioning of how agile interacts with the characteristics of bureaucratic organisations. Importantly, we also show that agile as a management fad serves as a projection surface for what actors want from a modern and digital organisation. Thus, the vocabulary of agile government within the narratives is inherently linked to other diffusing phenomena such as new work or digitalisation.
We examine how the gender of business owners is related to the wages paid to female relative to male employees working in their firms. Using Finnish register data and employing firm fixed effects, we find that the gender pay gap is—starting from a gender pay gap of 11 to 12%—two to three percentage points lower for hourly wages in female-owned firms than in male-owned firms. Results are robust to how the wage is measured, as well as to various further robustness checks. More importantly, we find substantial differences between industries. While, for instance, in the manufacturing sector, the gender of the owner plays no role in the gender pay gap, in several service sector industries, like ICT or business services, no or a negligible gender pay gap can be found, but only when firms are led by female business owners. Businesses with male ownership maintain a gender pay gap of around 10% also in the latter industries. With increasing firm size, the influence of the gender of the owner, however, fades. In large firms, it seems that others—firm managers—determine wages and no differences in the pay gap are observed between male- and female-owned firms.
Money matters!
(2024)
This paper examines the context dependency of attitudes toward maternal employment. We test three sets of factors that may affect these attitudes—economic benefits, normative obligations, and child-related consequences—by analyzing data from a unique survey experimental design implemented in a large-scale household panel survey in Germany (17,388 observations from 3,494 respondents). Our results show that the economic benefits associated with maternal employment are the most important predictor of attitudes supporting maternal employment. Moreover, we find that attitudes toward maternal employment vary by individual, household, and contextual characteristics (in particular, childcare quality). We interpret this variation as an indication that negative attitudes toward maternal employment do not necessarily reflect gender essentialism; rather, gender role attitudes are contingent upon the frames individuals have in mind.
This article examines how challenger parties enter the political arena and the effect of this entry by looking at the Italian 5 Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle – M5S). We explain the M5S's entry strategy in 2013 using the spatial approach to party competition and employing expert survey data collected for each national election between 2008 and 2018. These data allow us to analyse the changing spatial configuration of Italian politics due to the increasing salience of pro/anti-EU and pro/anti-immigration dimensions. We then apply the theoretical notion of the uncovered set (UCS) to trace how the M5S's entry reshaped the overall space of party competition, causing a realignment of existing parties. This work contributes to the ongoing debate on the electoral success of challenger parties and the emerging cleavages and polarization of party systems in Western European countries.
Physical fitness of primary school children differs depending on their timing of school enrollment
(2023)
Previous research has shown that children who were enrolled to school according to the legal key date (i.e., keyage children, between eight and nine years in third grade) exhibited a linear physical fitness development in the ninth year of life. In contrast, children who were enrolled with a delay (i.e., older-than-keyage children [OTK], between nine and ten years in third grade) exhibited a lower physical fitness compared to what would be expected for their age. In these studies, cross-sectional age differences within third grade and timing of school enrollment were confounded. The present study investigated the longitudinal development of keyage and OTK children from third to fifth grade. This design also afforded a comparison of the two groups at the same average chronological age, that is a dissociation of the effects of timing of school enrollment and age. We tested six physical fitness components: cardiorespiratory endurance, coordination, speed, power of lower and upper limbs, and static balance. 1502 children (i.e., 1206 keyage and 296 OTK children) from 35 schools were tested in third, fourth, and fifth grade. Except for cardiorespiratory endurance, both groups developed from third to fourth and from fourth to fifth grade and keyage children outperformed OTK children at the average ages of 9.5 or 10.5 years. For cardiorespiratory endurance, there was no significant gain from fourth to fifth grade and keyage and OTK children did not differ significantly at 10.5 years of age. One reason for a delayed school enrollment could be that a child is (or is perceived as) biologically younger than their chronological age at the school entry examination, implying a negative correlation between chronological and biological age for OTK children. Indeed, a simple reflection of chronological age brought the developmental rate of the chronologically youngest OTK children in line with the developmental rate observed for keyage children, but did not eliminate all differences. The mapping of chronological and biological age of OTK children and other possible reasons for lower physical fitness of OTK children remain a task for future research.
Divorce à l’allemande
(2022)
Avec la création de l’Académie de sociologie (AS), le champ sociologique allemand compte désormais une nouvelle association professionnelle qui s’ajoute à la Société allemande de sociologie (DGS), établie de longue date. Cet article passe en revue les principales positions discursives, les sujets de controverse majeurs ainsi que les grandes lignes de fracture qui ont conduit à ce schisme. Les conflits contemporains sont interprétés au travers d’une représentation empirique du champ de la sociologie allemande. De manière générale, la sociologie allemande contemporaine apparaît une fois de plus dominée par deux camps opposés, arbitrairement définis mais puissants, qui se partagent la domination d’une discipline, pourtant réellement pluraliste.
The paper argues that economists’ position-taking in discourses of crises should be understood in the light of economists’ positions in the academic field of economics. This hypothesis is investigated by performing a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) on a prosopographical data set of 144 French economists who positioned themselves between 2008 and 2021 in controversies over the euro crisis, the French political economic model, and French economics. In these disciplinary controversies, different forms of (post-)national academic capital are used by economists to either initiate change or defend the status quo. These strategies are then interpreted as part of more general power struggles over the basic national or post-national constitution and legitimate governance of economy and society.
This contribution presents an analysis of the structure and conflictual dynamics of contemporary German sociology which has recently separated into two professional societies. Using geometric data analysis, we present an empirical construction of the power/knowledge structure of the field, its paradigmatic plurality, and the various forms of sociological practices involved.
In this visualization, the authors show changes in family patterns by different race groups across two cohorts. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (born from 1957 to 1965) and 1997 (born from 1980 to 1984), the authors visualize the relationship-parenthood state distributions at each age between 15 and 35 years by race and cohort. The results suggest the rise of cohabiting mothers and the decline of married and divorced mothers among women born from 1980 to 1984. Black women born from 1980 to 1984 were more likely to experience single/childless and single/parent status compared with Black women born from 1957 to 1965. Although with some visible postponement in the recent cohort, white women in both cohorts were more likely to experience married/parent status than other race groups. The decline in married/parent status across the two generations was sharpest among Hispanic women. These descriptive findings highlight the importance of identifying race when discussing changes in family formation and dissolution trends across generations.
State- and private-led search-and-rescue are hypothesized to foster irregular migration (and thereby migrant fatalities) by altering the decision calculus associated with the journey. We here investigate this ‘pull factor’ claim by focusing on the Central Mediterranean route, the most frequented and deadly irregular migration route towards Europe during the past decade. Based on three intervention periods—(1) state-led Mare Nostrum, (2) private-led search-and-rescue, and (3) coordinated pushbacks by the Libyan Coast Guard—which correspond to substantial changes in laws, policies, and practices of search-and-rescue in the Mediterranean, we are able to test the ‘pull factor’ claim by employing an innovative machine learning method in combination with causal inference. We employ a Bayesian structural time-series model to estimate the effects of these three intervention periods on the migration flow as measured by crossing attempts (i.e., time-series aggregate counts of arrivals, pushbacks, and deaths), adjusting for various known drivers of irregular migration. We combine multiple sources of traditional and non-traditional data to build a synthetic, predicted counterfactual flow. Results show that our predictive modeling approach accurately captures the behavior of the target time-series during the various pre-intervention periods of interest. A comparison of the observed and predicted counterfactual time-series in the post-intervention periods suggest that pushback policies did affect the migration flow, but that the search-and-rescue periods did not yield a discernible difference between the observed and the predicted counterfactual number of crossing attempts. Hence we do not find support for search-and-rescue as a driver of irregular migration. In general, this modeling approach lends itself to forecasting migration flows with the goal of answering causal queries in migration research.
Das Risiko, durch einen Suizid im Gefängnis zu versterben, ist erhöht. Während der COVID-19-Pandemie wurden zum Infektionsschutz zahlreiche Maßnahmen, die beispielsweise eine deutliche Minderung der Kontakt- und Behandlungsangebote zur Folge hatten, eingeführt. Im Rahmen eines Kohortenvergleichs der Suizide und ausgewählter Merkmale der Suizident:innen in den Zeiträumen vom April 2017 bis zum Dezember 2019 sowie vom April 2020 bis zum Dezember 2022 wird untersucht, ob es eine Veränderung der Suizide während der Pandemie gab. Im Ergebnis zeigen sich eine Zunahme der Suizide während der Pandemie, insbesondere in den ersten 14 Tagen der Haft, und eine Zunahme der Suizide von Suizident:innen mit erhöhter Vulnerabilität. Keine Unterschiede wurden in den allgemeinen Risikomerkmalen für Suizide im Gefängnis festgestellt. Es ergeben sich Hinweise auf eine suizidpräventive Wirkung der Kontakt- und Behandlungsangebote. Daraus ergibt sich die Notwendigkeit, intensivere Präventionsangebote für Gefangene mit erhöhter Vulnerabilität bzw. geringerer Resilienz anzubieten.
Job satisfaction is a major driver of an individual’s subjective well-being and thus affects public health, societal prosperity, and organisations, as dissatisfied employees are less productive and more likely to change jobs. However, changing jobs does not necessarily lead to higher job satisfaction in the long run. Previous studies have shown, instead, that changing jobs only increases job satisfaction for a short period of time before it gradually falls back to similar levels as before. This phenomenon is known as the ’honeymoon–hangover’ pattern. In our study, we identify an important new moderator of the relation between job change and job satisfaction: the job–education match of job changes. Based on relative deprivation theory, we argue that job changes from being overeducated in a job lowers the likelihood of negative comparisons and thus increases the honeymoon period, lessens the hangover period, and increases long-term job satisfaction. We use data from the Socio-Economic Panel ranging from 1994–2018 and focus specifically on individual periods of employees before and after job changes (n = 134,404). Our results confirm that a change to a job that requires a matched education has a stronger and longer-lasting effect on job satisfaction, and that this effect is slightly lower for respondents born abroad.
The article analyzes the investigations conducted by the Berlin police into the subsequent perpetrator of the vehicle-ramming attack at a Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016. We explore why the police closed these investigations prematurely and thereby focus on an attempt to prevent lone actor terrorism. The analysis shows that the police closed its investigations owing to organizational dynamics driven by an increasing need to justify further resource investments in the face of absent conclusive evidence and scarce resources in relation to the organizational case ecology. We propose hypotheses for future research and formulate three contributions to existing research on the sociology of police, terrorism prevention, and lone actor research.