Publikationsliste KOPS

Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordination. In both cases, the result is decreasing employer coordination. We argue that in CMEs, the state may also play the role of “orchestrator” by supporting the revitalization of employer coordination. It does so through the deployment of ideational and institutional resources that mobilize employers’ associations on a voluntary basis. Applying our framework to a core area of coordinated capitalism, vocational education and training, we show that in both Germany and Switzerland, this indirect and soft form of state intervention was instrumental for turning around their crisis-stricken vocational training systems.

New technologies are a key driver of labor market change in recent decades. There are renewed concerns that technological developments in areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence will destroy jobs and create political upheaval. This article reviews the vibrant debate about the economic consequences of recent technological change and then discusses research about how digitalization may affect political participation, vote choice, and policy preferences. It is increasingly well established that routine workers have been the main losers of recent technological change and disproportionately support populist parties. However, at the same time, digitalization also creates a large group of economic winners who support the political status quo. The mechanisms connecting technology-related workplace risks to political behavior and policy demands are less well understood. Voters may fail to fully comprehend the relative importance of different causes of structural economic change and misattribute blame to other factors. We conclude with a list of pressing research questions.

How do nationalist parties attract votes? This article develops a novel supply-side explanation centered on status, arguing that nationalists succeed by combining group appeals to the nation with policy promises to improve the nation’s political and cultural status and the socio-economic status of its median member. Drawing on several original datasets, this expectation is tested on Imperial Austria in 1907, where multiple nationalist parties competed in first-time mass elections. We find that group appeals to the nation and promises to improve its political and cultural status resonate very well with agricultural workers, whose economic sector was declining, but not with industrial workers, whose sector was on the rise. By contrast, offering social policy helps nationalists among industrial workers, but less clearly so among agricultural workers. This article shows that nationalist mobilization is not a mere distraction from class politics; rather, the politics of nationalism, class, and status are closely intertwined.

Childhood and adolescence are important life periods for the development of health status and physical activity (PA) behaviours. This study analyses the stability and potential changes of self-rated health status, overweight and PA behaviour over time, specifically focusing on the age and the socioeconomic status of children and adolescents. We employ representative longitudinal data for German children and adolescents from the Motorik-Modul Study and the German Health Interview and Examination Survey. Using four different dichotomous health status and PA indicators (self-rated health status [SRHS]; overweight; moderate-to-vigorous PA; and leisure sports engagement), we report within-person transition rates across the panel waves when the survey was taken (2003–2006, 2009–2012, and 2014–2017). Additionally, we report results of logistic regressions estimating the impact of children's age, gender, migration background, and their parents' socioeconomic status on these transition rates. The transition rates show mixed results. While children and adolescents from highly problematic states reporting bad SRHS and no leisure sports engagement at an early stage tend to improve later on, overweight children mostly stay overweight. Age and social inequality indicators correlate with some of the chances of improving or worsening the health and PA states. Most clearly, high parental status prevents the health status and PA from worsening over all transitions, particularly becoming overweight, representing a ratchet effect. The results of the present study underline that health policy needs to target specific groups to reduce social inequality in the health status and PA of children and adolescents.

The study examines the relationship between sudden- and gradual-onset climate events and migration, hypothesizing that this relationship is mediated by the adaptive capacity of affected individuals. We use survey data from regions of Cambodia, Nicaragua, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam that were affected by both types of events with representative samples of non-migrant residents and referral samples of migrants. Although some patterns are country-specific, the general findings indicate that less educated and lower-income people are less likely to migrate after exposure to sudden-onset climate events compared to their counterparts with higher levels of education and economic resources. These results caution against sweeping predictions that future climate-related events will be accompanied by widespread migration.

While a large body of research addresses both subject choice and student dropout in higher education, much less is known about switching the initially chosen major. Therefore, we ask why students switch their major in higher education and analyse this for the case of Germany, taking the timing and the degree of such switches (within and across subject groups) into account. Based on the extended rational choice framework, we identify three aspects that might explain switching majors: individual achievement in secondary education, a (mis)match between individual occupational interests and the content of studies and parental and peer judgement regarding the initial subject choice. We test the derived hypotheses by applying logistic regression models to representative data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Starting Cohort 5. Our results indicate that the analysed aspects of individual achievement, person-major fit and social expectations affect switching majors, but their influence varies according to the degree and timing of the switch. While high-achieving students are more likely to switch majors, especially across disciplines and at a later stage in their studies, a mismatch in occupational interests mainly affects switching majors across broad subject groups. Finally, disapproval of the initial subject choice by parents and peers matters most for switches during the first two semesters and across academic disciplines.

Background
A previous meta-analysis (Kuiper et al., 2016) has shown that multiple aspects of social relationships are associated with cognitive decline in older adults. Yet, results indicated possible bias in estimations of statistical effects due to the heterogeneity of study design and measurements. We have updated this meta-analysis adding all relevant publications from 2012 to 2020 and performed a cumulative meta-analysis to map the evolution of this growing field of research (+80% of studies from 2012-2020 compared to the period considered in the previous meta-analysis).

Methods
Scopus and Web of Science were searched for longitudinal cohort studies examining structural, functional and combined effects of social relationships. We combined Odds Ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) using random effects meta-analysis and assessed sources of heterogeneity and the likelihood of publication bias. The risk of bias was evaluated with the Quality of Prognosis Studies in Systematic Reviews (QUIPS) tool.

Results
The review was prospectively registered on PROSPERO (ID: CRD42019130667). We identified 34 new articles published in 2012-2020. Poor social relationships were associated with cognitive decline with increasing precision of estimates compared to previously reviewed studies [(for structural, 17 articles, OR: 1.11; 95% CI: 1.08; 1.14) (for functional, 16 articles, OR: 1.12; 95% CI: 1.05; 1.20) (for combined, 5 articles, OR: 1.15; 95% CI: 1.06; 1.24)]. Meta-regression, risk and subgroup analyses showed that the precision of estimations improved in recent studies mostly due to increased sample sizes.

Conclusions
Our cumulative meta-analysis would confirm that multiple aspects of social relationships are associated with cognitive decline. Yet, there is still evidence of publication bias and relevant information on study design is often missing, which could lead to an over-estimation of their statistical effects.

Using administrative German data, we show that large cities allow for a more efficient matching between workers and firms and this has important consequences for geographical inequality. Specifically, the match between high-quality workers and high-quality plants is significantly tighter in large cities relative to small cities. Wages in large cities are higher not only because of the higher worker quality, but also because of a stronger assortative matching. Strong assortative matchig in large cities magnifies wage differences caused by worker sorting, and is a key factor in explaining the growth of geographical wage disparities over the last three decades.

In this study, we merge the literature on homeownership regimes, which focuses to a lesser extent on the consequences of wealth and social inequality, with the literature on wealth and social stratification, which overlooks the importance of homeownership regimes in contributing to those inequalities. Within this framework, we examine to what extent homeownership regimes shape class inequality in homeownership among young adults and the mortgage debt burden that usually accompanies it. We first develop an updated typology of homeownership regimes that incorporates the role of the family via intergenerational wealth transfers (IWT) such as gifts and housing assets. This dimension was theoretically underdeveloped and empirically absent from previous homeownership typologies. Second, we employ this typology to investigate class-based gaps in homeownership and mortgage debt burden within and between homeownership regimes. This is done by pooling data for a total of 20 countries from two sources: the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2013–2014 (EuroStat) for EU countries, and the Household Expenditure Survey 2012–2013 (CBS) for Israel. Using multivariate modeling, we find that homeownership regimes in which IWT in the form of financial support is common practice increase class inequality in homeownership compared to regimes in which IWT of assets is common practice. Contrary to the literature suggesting that liberal mortgage markets advance inclusion, it appears that in the homeownership regime characterized by the most liberal housing finance system (which includes Northern European countries and the Netherlands), class inequality in mortgaged homeownership is the widest but class inequality in mortgage debt burden is the narrowest. Homeownership regimes characterized by IWT of assets (which include Southern and Central Eastern European countries) reveal the opposite patterns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on homeownership regimes and wealth inequality, with a specific focus on young adults.

Battery electric vehicles generate a significant share of their greenhouse gas emissions during production and later, when in use, through the energy used for charging. A shift in charging behavior could substantially reduce emissions if aligned with the fluctuating availability of renewable energy. Financial incentives and environmental appeals have been discussed as potential means to achieve this. We report evidence from a randomized controlled trial in which cost-free and “green” charging was advertised via email notifications to customers of a charging service provider. Emails invited to charge during midday hours (11:00 to 15:00) of days with high predicted shares of renewable energy. Results show a significant increase in the number of charging processes in the critical time, and in the amount of energy charged (kWh), despite only marginal monetary savings of 5€ on average. A further increase in kWh charged was observed on weekends. Under the assumption that these charging processes replaced regular overnight charging at home, this represents reduction in CO₂ emissions of over 50%.