RWI BERLIN
NETWORK SEMINAR

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 1:30 - 2:30 pm

Title: Rescue on Stage: Border Enforcement and Public Attention in the Mediterranean Sea

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 1:30 - 2:30 pm

Title: tba

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 1:30 - 2:30 pm

Title: The Cost of Tolerating Intolerance: Right-wing Protest and Hate Crimes

Abstract: Freedom of speech is central to democracy, but protests that amplify extremist views expose a critical trade-off between civil liberties and public safety. This paper investigates how right-wing demonstrations affect the incidence of hate crimes, focusing on Germany’s largest far-right movement since World War II. Leveraging a difference-in-differences framework with instrumental variable and event-study approaches, we find that a 20% increase in local protest attendance nearly doubles hate crime occurrences. We explore three potential mechanisms—signaling, agitation, and coordination—by examining protest dynamics, spatial diffusion, media influence, counter-mobilization, and crime characteristics. Our analysis reveals that large protests primarily act as signals of broad xenophobic support, legitimizing extremist violence. This signaling effect propagates through right-wing social media networks and is intensified by local newspaper coverage and Twitter discussions. Consequently, large protests shift local equilibria, resulting in sustained higher levels of violence primarily perpetrated by repeat offenders. Notably, these protests trigger resistance predominantly online, rather than physical counter-protests.

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 1:30 - 2:30 pm

Title: Occupational Aspirations and Investments in Education: Experimental Evidence from Cambodia

Abstract: Students in low-income contexts often lack guidance in their career decisions, which can lead to a misallocation of educational investments. We report on a randomized field experiment conducted with 1,715 students in rural Cambodia and show that a half-day career-guidance workshop designed to support adolescents in developing occupational aspirations increased educational investments. We document substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects by baseline student performance. While the workshop increased schooling efforts of high-performing students, treated low-performing students reduced their educational investments. We develop a simple model that explains this treatment effect heterogeneity by baseline performance.

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 1:30 - 2:30 pm

Title: tba

Abstract: tba

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Title: The direct and indirect effects of stimulus policy: Evidence from Germany's Cash for Clunkers Program

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: Effects of economic and social incentives on bureaucratic quality - Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Title: tba

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 am - 11:30 pm

Title: (Don't) Take it Easy: Which Job Offers Get Rejected and Why?

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Title: „Minimum wages, wage dispersion and financial constraints in firms“

Abstract: This paper studies how minimum wages affect the wage distribution if firms face financial constraints. Using German employer-employee data and firm balance sheets, we document that the within-firm wage dispersion decreases more with higher minimum wages when firms are financially constrained. We introduce financial frictions into a search and matching labor market model with stochastic job matching, imperfect information, and endogenous effort. In line with the empirical literature, the model predicts that a higher minimum wage reduces hirings and separations. Firms become more selective such that their employment and wage dispersion fall. If effort increases strongly, firms may increase employment at the expense of higher wage dispersion. Financially constrained firms are more selective and reward effort less. As a result, within-firm wage dispersion and employment in these firms fall more with the minimum wage.

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: The long-run Effects of Immigration: Evidence Across a Barrier to Refugee Settlement

Abstract: We identify the causal effect of immigration on productivity, wages, incomes, and rents in the long run using a spatial regression discontinuity design (RDD). Our spatial RDD builds on a short-lived barrier to refugee settlement within West Germany after WWII. Comparing municipalities in a narrow band around this barrier, we find no socio-economic differences before WWII. In particular, population density had always been identical. But when the barrier to refugee settlement was removed, population density was about 20 percentage points higher where refugees had been allowed to settle. In 2020, 70 years later, the higher population density still persists. Today’s higher density coincides with higher productivity, wages, and rents. We argue that these economic differences are the result of agglomeration economies driven by the higher population density where refugees had been allowed settle. We present three findings on the nature of these agglomeration economies.

Location: Hybrid – Berliner Büro und Teams-Veranstaltung

Time: 12:00 - 13:00 pm

Title: Learning to see the world’s opportunities: memory, mental experiencing and the economic lives of the vulnerable

Abstract: Work in neuroscience and psychology has underscored the role of mental experiencing for decision making. Using the same senses that we use to perceive the world, mental experiencing enables us to compare the consequences of our actions across different decisions. Trauma affects our memory and thus may impede our ability to use mental experiencing effectively. We measure the quality of mental experiencing and evaluate how it impacts economic outcomes through two randomized controlled trials with vulnerable populations that have suffered trauma and violence. In a sample of refugees in Ethiopia, learning to generate "positive" mental experiences related to the host economy leads to increased intentions to stay, more economic activity, and improved wellbeing. In Colombia, we embed controlled mental experiencing within an entrepreneurship program to explore whether it may enhance its effectiveness. We compare outcomes of standard business training, business training with mental experiencing, and no training. Participants in the standard business training see declines in both mental experiencing and earnings. These negative effects disappear in the mental experiencing arm. The highest gains from improved mental experiencing accrue to the most vulnerable and traumatized participants inthe sample, highlighting the need for trauma-informed programs.

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Title: „Heterogeneous peer effects and gender-based interventions for teenage obesity”

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: Effects of economic and social incentives on bureaucratic quality - Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:00 - 11:00 am

Title: "Is Migration Reducing Labor Scarcity? Evidence From Long-Term Care"

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:00 - 11:00 am

Title: "What a difference a day makes: Mortality effects of the school starting age"

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: Workplace Connections and Migration: Evidence from German Reunification

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: Does Co-Residence with Parents-in-law Reduce Women’s Employment in India?

Abstract: We examine the effect of co-residence with fathers- and mothers-in-law on married women’s employment in India. Instrumental variable fixed effects estimates using two different household panel datasets indicate that co-residence with a father-in-law reduces married women’s employment by 11-13%, while co-residence with a mother-in-law has no effect. Difference-in-difference estimates show that married women’s employment increases following the death of a co-residing father-in-law, but not mother-in-law. We investigate three classes of explanations for this: income effects, increased domestic responsibilities, and social norms. Our evidence is consistent with gender- and generational norms intersecting to constrain married women’s employment when parents-in-law co-reside.

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: Strategic Bureaucratic Opacity: Evidence from Death Investigation Laws and Police Killings

Abstract: Police accountability is essential in upholding the social contract. Monitoring the monitors is, however, not without difficulty. This paper reveals how police departments exploit specific laws surrounding death investigations to facilitate the under-reporting of police killings. Our results show that US counties in which law enforcement can certify the cause of death, including counties which appoint the sheriff as the lead death investigator, display $46 percent more under-reported police killings than their comparable adjacent counties. Drawing on a novel adapted-LATE potential outcomes' framework, we demonstrate that under-reported police killings are most often reclassified as `circumstances undetermined' homicides. We also show that counties with permissive death certification laws withhold more homicide reports from the public. The main under-reporting results are primarily driven by under-reporting of White and Hispanic deaths in our analysis sample, with the effect on Hispanic people particularly pronounced along the US-Mexico border region. We do not find evidence of moderating effects due to body-worn cameras, nor that excess under-reported killings are associated with more violence directed towards police. We do, however, note a nationwide positive correlation between the permissiveness of gun-laws and under-reported police killings. Our results do not indicate that other differences in death investigation systems – coroner vs. medical examiner, appointed vs. elected, or physician vs. non-physician – affect the under-reporting of police killings.

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: Long-term effects of equal sharing: Evidence from inheritance rules for land

Location: Hybrid – Berlin Office and Teams Link

Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am

Title: Industrialization, returns, inequality (co-authored with Thilo Albers and Timo Stieglitz)

Abstract: How do technological revolutions impact wealth inequality? To answer this question, we turn to the industrial revolution and analyze its role for wealth concentration both empirically and theoretically. Based on a novel dataset on regional top wealth shares and industrialization in Prussia, we provide causal evidence that industrialization can explain the shift in the top 1 share observed over the 19th century and also led to a fattening of the wealth distribution's tail. We rationalize these effects by introducing a dynamic 2-sector structure featuring scale and dynastic type dependence into an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous returns to capital. The simulations suggest that the combination of these two features explains about half of the total increase of the top 1 share, while the other half resulted from the general increase in capital returns.