CHAIR OF ECONOMICS

APPLIED ECONOMICS

The phrase "publish or perish” succinctly describes the great importance of publications in academia for careers, promotions, and third-party funding. This empirical project investigates various potential biases related to author/editor institutional affiliation, gender, and location that may impede the efficiency of the publishing process.

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The use of smoke alarms has increased across countries, often as a result of legal initiatives that made their use compulsory. Evidence on the effectiveness of such legislative measures in reducing fire-related fatalities and bodily harm, however, is still lacking. This empirical project seeks to provide first such evidence.

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Im Mittelpunkt des empirisch ausgerichteten DFG Projektes steht die Frage, wie sich der starke Zustrom Asyl- und Schutzsuchender nach Deutschland im Jahr 2015 auf verschiedene Bereiche der Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft ausgewirkt hat. Konkret werden die Auswirkungen des Massenzustroms an Flüchtlingen nach Deutschland in vier Kernbereichen analysieren: (1) Wahlergebnisse, (2) Immobilienmärkte, (3) Gewalt gegen Ausländer (in der aktuellen sowie letzten Flüchtlingskrise in den 1990er Jahren) und Kriminalität durch Ausländer, sowie (4) Spendenverhalten, sowohl monetär als auch in Form von Gütern und Freiwilligendiensten.

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Overseas students in China have increased substantially over the last two decades, as has the number of Confucius Institutes abroad.  This empirical project investigates whether the growing number of such public institutions, which aim to promote Chinese language and culture, contributed to the growth in overseas student numbers in China.

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International tax evasion has become a major source of discontent for tax authorities. State purchases of bank data on suspected tax evaders from international tax havens constitute one tool to combat such tax evasion. Increasing the risks of detection, such purchases may spur voluntary disclosures for fear of facing charges for tax fraud. Tax authorities in Germany have made repeated use of this tool in recent years, above all in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany's most populous federal state. Using self-compiled data for North-Rhine Westphalia on the timing and content of data acquisitions and on monthly voluntary disclosures of international tax evasion involving Swiss banks, we study the effects that such acquisitions had on the evolution of voluntary disclosures over time.

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Evidence on the existence of a trade-off between child quantity and child quality, as suggested by Gary S. Becker, is still inconclusive. This also holds true for empirical studies on China that exploit for identification the country's One-Child Policy (OCP) as an exogenous source of variation in the number of offspring. However, this body of literature suffers from a number of shortcomings, in particular measurement error in the key policy variable (a household's coverage by OCP) and in the outcome variable of interest (schooling choices, i.e. child quality). Using census data for China and a continuous OCP variable that can address these shortcomings, the results provide evidence for the existence of a sizeable quantity-quality trade-off within households with mothers who are Han and have agricultural Hukou.

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The Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan in March 2011 caused a fundamental change in Germany s energy policy which led to the immediate shut down of nearly half of its nuclear power plants. This paper uses data from Germany´s largest internet platform for real estate to investigate the effect of Fukushima on the German housing market. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that Fukushima reduced house prices near nuclear power plants that were in operation before Fukushima by almost 5%. House prices near sites that were shut down right after the accident even fell by 9.7%. Our results suggest that economic reasons are of prime importance for the observed fall in house prices near nuclear power plants in Germany.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9^th November 1989 sparked a mass exodus of East Germans to West Germany. This paper exploits the natural experiment provided by the unexpected disintegration of socialist East Germany to study the impact that immigration has on residential housing rents in recipient regions. Using a spatial correlation approach, annual district-level migration data for 1991 and 1992 and unique rental price indicators from Germany's major regional property market information system, we find strong evidence for a positive and sizeable effect of immigration on rental prices of residential housing. A one percent population increase due to immigration is associated with an approximate increase in minimum and average category rents by 4.8 and 3.3%, respectively. Additional explorations that employ IV approaches, based on historical settlement patterns of migrants from the former Soviet Occupation Zone as well as various exogenous origin-region push factors related to the deteriorating economic conditions in East Germany following reunification, yield estimates of even larger magnitude. These results suggest that immigration has important economic effects outside the labour market, traditionally the prime domain of economic enquiries into the consequences of immigration. Our findings cast doubt on the appropriateness of this bias in focus.

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