Redistribution Preferences, Attitudes towards Immigrants, and Ethnic Diversity, 2020, IAB-Discussion Paper 23/2020, IAB Nürnberg.
Ethnic diversity plays a crucial role in shaping national economic and social policy. A change in the ethnic composition of a country affects citizens’ everyday life and social environment and may challenge present societal values, such as solidarity with and trust in fellow citizens. Based on the European Social Survey, I show that more contact with members of other ethnic groups in daily life is positively related to more open attitudes of natives towards immigrants. More interethnic contact of natives reduces their social distance to immigrants, their perception of immigrants as a threat to society, and their opposition to future immigration. In turn, an open-minded and tolerant attitude promotes mutual trust and solidarity within society. Since attachment to fellow residents and a feeling of fellowship are essential drivers for supporting governmental redistribution measures, I argue that there is no direct, but an indirect relationship between ethnic diversity and natives‘ support for redistribution, with attitudes towards immigrants and immigration acting as mediators. By applying bivariate recursive probit estimations, I can decompose the predictors‘ marginal effects on natives‘ support for redistribution into a direct effect and an indirect effect that works through natives’ attitudes towards immigrants. A decomposition method that has so far been relatively unnoticed in the empirical literature. Our results reveal that perception of immigrants as a threat to societal values or country’s economy decrease natives‘ support for redistribution substantially by 15 to 22 percent. The same applies to natives who reject future inflows of immigrants. Natives‘ desire for social distance to immigrants in private and working life, however, does not affect their demand for redistribution. Thus, the diffuse fear of losing intangible goods triggered by immigration is substantial in the formation of natives‘ socio-political attitudes. Living in ethnically more diverse neighborhoods, though, increases natives‘ support for redistribution by 0.4 to 1.5 percent through the promotion of pro-immigrant attitudes and stronger solidarity with fellow residents. These results are robust to IV estimation strategies, which control for reverse causality and the possibility of natives‘ selective out-migration.
Wage Mobility, Wage Inequality, and Tasks: Empirical Evidence from Germany, 1984-2014, 2017, Discussion Paper No. 139, Chair of Economic Order and Social Policy, University of Würzburg.
Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and a newly available task database for Germany, the evolution of wage inequality, wage mobility, and the origins of wage mobility are studied. Since 2006 the increase in the German wage inequality has markedly slowed down, but there is a steady decline in wage mobility since 2000. In particular, workers in the services sector have ceteris paribus a significantly lower wage mobility than in the manufacturing sector. This result is mainly driven by the decrease of wage mobility in the health care and social services sector. Impact of a worker’s unemployment spells and occupation on wage mobility has strengthened over the observation period. Between 2006 and 2013 wage and employment growth have been even polarized, but the routinezation hypothesis can only partially confirmed for wage mobility patterns. Workers who mainly perform manual tasks have a lower wage mobility over the observation period, but workers in cognitive routine occupations show a higher and increasing wage mobility over time compared to manual non-routine workers. In order to examine asymmetries in the effects of basic covariates on a worker’s downward and upward wage mobility, multinomial logit estimations were applied. Except for the part-time workers, there are no obvious differences for the remaining covariates.
Transmission Channels of Intergenerational Income Mobility: Empirical Evidence from Germany and the United States (with Sauerhammer, S.), 2017, Discussion Paper No. 138, Chair of Economic Order and Social Policy, University of Würzburg.
Relying on harmonized individual data for Germany and the United States, we perform a country comparison regarding the underlying mechanisms of the intergenerational income mobility. By applying descriptive and structural decomposition methods, we estimate the relative importance of the transmission of financial resources and endowments within a family. Although the results from both approaches are similar, the structural decompositions rather allow a causal interpretation due to instrumenting the transmission channels. Whereas a family’s financial resources and endowments almost equally contribute to the intergenerational income mobility in Germany, endowments account for solely 30 percent in the United States. Nonlinearities in the transmission channels along the income distribution in the United States indicate that the endowment effect slightly decreases in relative importance across income percentiles. In Germany, there are no significant nonlinearities at all.