Publikationsliste KOPS

In this overview, we seek to provide a comprehensive resource for scholars of female immigrant labor market integration in Europe, to act both as a reference and a roadmap for future studies in this domain. We begin by presenting a contextual history of immigration to and within Europe since the Second World War, before outlining the major theoretical assumptions about immigrant women’s labor market disadvantage. We then synthesize the empirical findings from quantitative studies published between 2000 and 2020 and analyze how they line up with the theoretical predictions. We supplement the review with descriptive analyses using data from 2019, which expose any discrepancies between the current situation in European countries and the situation during the time periods considered in the reviewed studies. Our review has three main take-aways. First, the theoretically relevant determinants of immigrant women’s labor market integration are generally supported by empirical evidence, but the unexplained heterogeneity that remains in many cases between immigrant women and other groups on the labor market calls for more systematic and comprehensive investigations. Second, quantitative studies which take a holistic approach to studying the labor market disadvantages of immigrant women—and all the considerations related to their gender and nativity that this entails—are rare in this body of literature, and future studies should address this. Third, fruitful avenues for future contributions to this field include expanding on certain overlooked outcomes, like immigrant women’s self-employment, as well as geographic regions that until now have received little attention, especially by employing the most recent data.

Economic inequality at the local level has been shown to be an important predictor of people’s political perceptions and preferences. However, research on these questions is hampered by the fact that local inequality is difficult to measure and systematic data collections are rare, in particular in countries of the Global South. We propose a new measure of local inequality derived from nighttime light (NTL) emissions data. Our measure corresponds to the local inequality in per capita nighttime light emissions, using VIIRS-derived nighttime light emissions data and spatial population data from WorldPop. We validate our estimates using local inequality estimates from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for a sample of African countries. Our results show that nightlight-based inequality estimates correspond well to those derived from survey data, and that the relationship is not due to structural factors such as differences between urban and rural regions. We also present predictive results, where we approximate the (survey-based) level of local inequality with our nighttime light indicator. This illustrates how our approach can be used for new cases where no other data are available.

Objective: This article investigates the role of motivation in female immigrants' labour force participation. Focusing on recently-arrived immigrants (who have resided in the host country for 18 months or less), we compare the outcomes of two different ethnic groups in Germany: Poles and Turks.

Background: The immigrant integration literature tends to focus on the role of resources in immigrant labour market integration. However, when examining particularly the labour force participation of female immigrants, their motivation for joining the labour force is also important. Previous studies of female immigrants in Germany have often neglected this consideration, which includes aspects like culturally-specific gender values and perceived ethnic discrimination.

Method: We use data from the SCIP project (Diehl et al., 2015) to conduct logistic regressions on female immigrants’ labour force participation. Our sample includes 829 female immigrants from Poland and Turkey between the ages of 18-60, who were either active in the labour force or were 'at risk' of entering.

Results: In line with previous studies, our analysis shows that female immigrants' labour market resources, mainly their prior work experience and German proficiency, greatly reduce the ethnic gap in labour force participation rates. Moreover, motivational factors have a large impact on this outcome for both groups, and greatly enhance the picture that our empirical models present. However, we find no evidence that perceived ethnic discrimination plays an important role.

Conclusion: Our analysis indicates that when seeking to understand the labour market participation of female immigrants, their resources and motivation should be seen as key components of a gender-sensitive analysis.

Objective: This paper draws on data from the Microcensus to provide a long-term overview of the labour market performance of different arrival cohorts of non-German women and men who immigrated to (western) Germany.

Background: While there is a large body of research on the labour market outcomes of migrants to Germany, a long-term and gender-specific overview is missing.

Method: We provide descriptive analyses of the employment rates, working hours, and occupational status levels of different arrival cohorts by gender, calendar year, and duration of stay. The data cover the time period 1976-2015.

Results: With the exception of the earliest cohort, migrant women and men were consistently less likely to be employed than their German counterparts. While the average working hours of migrant women of earlier cohorts were longer than those of German women, this pattern reversed due to a considerable decline in the average working hours of migrant women across subsequent cohorts. The occupational status levels of female and male migrants increased across the arrival cohorts, corresponding to higher levels of education. Analyses by duration of stay indicate that the occupational status of the arrival cohorts tended to decline during their initial years of residence, and to stagnate thereafter. This pattern seems to be due in part to selective outmigration.

Conclusion: Our results clearly show that the labour market performance of immigrants varied greatly by arrival cohort, reflecting the conditions and policy contexts during which they entered Germany. This conclusion applied especially to migrant women.

We analyze opposition towards Covid-19 containment measures by assessing the role of self-interest, sociotropic threat, political predispositions, and infection rates. We base our analyses on two waves of survey data from Germany (N = 3258/3201). Our measure of self-interest includes objective indicators for and subjective perceptions of individual threat from containment measures in the economic sphere and in the family and health domains. We also analyze whether the role of self-interest changes as the pandemic proceeds in its course. Our results show that self-interest plays a limited role in explaining attitudes about containment measures. More important are broader political predispositions such as trust in institutions, including the government. Attitudes are unrelated to local rates of infection or death. This pattern has remained stable over the course of the pandemic. We discuss the relevance of these findings with respect to the general enforceability of public policies that serve collective goals, such as efforts to limit climate change. Parts of the population may be reluctant to comply with these public policies even if the associated costs to the individual are small. This is less because of people’s personal circumstances, and more because of their opposition to government interventions as such.

One of the most important controversies in the health economics discourse of the last twenty years concerns the question whether the imminent ageing of the population in most OECD countries will place an additional burden on the tax-payers who finance public health care systems. These systems are usually pay-as-you-go financed with taxes or contributions depending on labor income and pensions. Population ageing due to rising longevity and below-replacement fertility in coming decades will lower the population share of working-age persons and raise the share of pensioners. Since labor income exceeds pensions by far, this will weaken the tax base so that tax or contribution rates will rise notably.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed many aspects of our society and work life. This study assesses how daily variations in employees' work engagement are affected by daily variations in infection rates in employees' communities. Applying the conceptual framework of event system theory, we argue that surging COVID-19 cases have an impact on employee engagement, depending on the individual sensemaking processes of the pandemic. We assume that employee age and received leader support are key context factors for these sensemaking processes and that particularly older employees and employees who receive little leader consideration react with lower work engagement levels toward rising local COVID-19 infections in their proximity. We find support for most of our proposed relationships in an 8-day diary study of German employees, which we integrate with official COVID-19 case statistics on the county level. We discuss the implications of these results for the literature on extreme events and individual workplace behavior. Furthermore, these findings have important implications for companies and executives who are confronted with local COVID-19 outbreaks or other extreme societal events.

The article investigates the conditions of multiple engagement in the private and public realm in the second half of life. More specifically, I look at the relationship between informal care-giving and formal volunteering in a country-comparative way. Based on longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement, 2004–2015, I investigate the 50+ population in 13 European countries. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity by using conditional fixed-effect logistic regression models, I confirm earlier findings that care-givers are more likely to volunteer than non-care-givers; this effect is independent of care-giving intensity but only true for those who care outside their own household. As to macro-level influences, I find that both care-in-kind and cash-for-care expenditures increase the likelihood of volunteering among the 50+ population. The effect of cash-for-care expenditure is even stronger for the group of those who give intensive care outside their own households than for non-care-givers. Moreover, I find effects related to family's and women's role in society. First, I show a negative effect of a country's societal norm of family orientation on volunteering participation for those giving sporadic care outside their household but also among non-care-givers. Second, in countries with higher female labour market participation among the middle-aged, the volunteering likelihood is higher for sporadic female care-givers outside their own household but also among female non-care-givers.

Starting a new job is able to boost people's careers, but might come at the expense of other areas of life. To investigate individual implications of job mobility, we analyse the effects of job changes on time-use and indicators of subjective well-being using rich data from a representative German panel survey. We find that job switchers report relatively high levels of life satisfaction, at least for the first time after the job change. There is no such ‘honeymoon’ period for job changes triggered by plant closures. Instead, we find evidence for a harmful impact of involuntary mobility on family life.

It has long been overlooked that factions of finance such as banks and insurers can have opposing policy interests. This paper is concerned with the preferences and strategies of private financial actors in the context of private prefunded pensions. To capture the “tug of war” among these actors, this paper identifies their different financial business models (insurance- and investment-orientation), political roles (financial incumbents and challengers), and levels at which infighting may occur (political and product-market level). For the German case, it shows that product-market competition among financial incumbents and challengers over retirement savings products only turned into competition politics during the 1990s, when shifting political winds provided an opening to insert path-shaping instruments in line with the program of finance capitalism. Financial actors’ preferences are not a derivative of economic or functional incentives, but socially embedded in that they are crucially shaped by interactions with their competitors and the political environment. The analysis disentangles the complex web of competition, cooperation, and ownership among factions of finance and discerns their genuine preferences from those strategically adjusted to context. This sheds doubt on functionalist explanations of (pension) financialization and enhances our understanding of how financial actors form and pursue their preferences.

Based on longitudinal data from Germany, we analyze how perceptions of discrimination change once migrants’ integration evolves. Individuals who identify more strongly with the host country, speak the language, have native friends, and are adequately employed report less discrimination overall. However, group-specific analyses reveal that German-born Turks feel more rather than less discriminated against after their language skills and their identification increase. For this group, we find evidence for the “integration paradox”, i.e., the finding that better educated migrants have more rather than less negative attitudes about the host society. Results suggest that attributional processes rather than rising exposure to discrimination might be the main mechanism linking integration to higher levels of perceived discrimination. Obviously, discrimination does not disappear for groups facing salient ethnic boundaries and is met with growing awareness and sensitivity among individuals that have become more similar to the majority of members. This, in turn, by no means implies that perceived discrimination is detached from reality.