Contributions in Merlin

We introduce a demand-side trade model to shed light on the interaction between countries’ income distributions, the patterns of international trade and parallel trade policy restrictions in general equilibrium. We provide a comprehensive theoretical foundation for the role of income inequality for trade that allows distinguishing within- and between-country inequality. To bring differences in the willingness to pay of differentially rich consumers to the forefront of the analysis, we deviate from the canonical model by replacing the standard CES preferences with non-homothetic 0-1 preferences. We characterize and numerically solve the trade equilibrium for a discrete labor endowment distribution with several consumer-income groups. Our model predicts trade intensity to be increasing in the income distribution overlap, which is our preferred proxy for demand similarity. Our model, therefore, provides a theoretical foundation for the Linder hypothesis, that bilateral trade volume is increasing in the similarity of demand structure between two countries. Furthermore, our model predicts a Manhattan effect, capturing that poor consumers are badly off if they are a small minority in a predominantly rich country due to the high price level for basic products.

I investigate how the housing market in a binational agglomeration responds to a large trans-border public transport connectivity improvement. For this, I exploit the recent introduction of the Léman Express, a suburban train service in the Greater Geneva area. The new line seamlessly connects the Swiss and the French side of the agglomeration, resulting in a substantial travel time reduction. I document locally concentrated construction booms and increasing prices at locations benefiting from the new service about two years in anticipation of the opening. I study the impact of the anticipated commuting cost decrease on residential mobility flows and discuss the resulting changes in neighborhood composition. Locations near soon well-connected stations experience a shift towards affluent, home-owning cross-border workers resulting in a gentrification push for these historically predominantly poor neighborhoods. This is largely driven by inflows from adjacent areas and internal relocations whereas trans-border relocation flows remain unimportant.

It is commonly accepted that income deprivation suppresses civic engagement. Yet, it is still unclear how policies that seek to tackle deprivation, such as anti-poverty schemes, affect political participation in targeted constituencies: Do they mobilize new citizens (mobilization) or keep engaged those with the habit of voting (mitigation)? I theoretically distinguish between these two mechanisms by focusing on cash transfers, the most widely adopted anti-poverty scheme worldwide. Empirically, I evaluate the Renda Básica de Cidadania, the largest unconditional cash transfer in Latin America, which allows for isolating the effect of cash payments on voting behavior. Estimates from a difference-in-differences design reveal a three percentage points increase (a net growth of 4%) in voter turnout in posttreatment elections. Leveraging municipal-level data in a synthetic control method approach, I show that a mitigation mechanism induces this effect, i.e., the payment of monthly cash transfers reduced the incentives to abstain in elections.

It is widely accepted in political science – and remarkably established in public discourse – that status anxieties fuel a far right backlash against progressive politics. This narrative suggests that right-wing conservatives perceive the status of women, racial, or sexual minorities as threatening. Using open-ended survey questions fielded in Germany, we show that women and minorities do figure in people’s perceptions of status hierarchies, but in very specific ways: First, overall, people still perceive status as largely socioeconomically determined. Second, sociocultural groups figure in perceptions of who is gaining/losing status, less so in perceptions of the top/bottom of society. Third, more than authoritarian voters, it is social progressives who perceive women and minorities as “winners”. While on race/ethnicity, we find evidence for a backlash, on gender and sexuality we find more evidence for a progressive momentum. This matters for progressive politics today and for how we empirically study status concerns.

Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers following economic shocks helps to facilitate local labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We examine the role that immigration may have played in enabling U.S. commuting zones to respond to manufacturing job loss caused by import competition from China. Although population headcounts of the foreign-born fell by more than those of the native-born in regions exposed to the China trade shock, the overall contribution of immigration to labor market adjustment in this episode was small. Because most U.S. immigrants arrived in the country after manufacturing regions were already mature, few took up jobs in industries that would later see increased import penetration from China. The foreign-born share of the working-age population in regions with high trade exposure was only three-fifths that in regions with low exposure. Immigration thus appears more likely to aid adjustment to cyclical shocks, in which job loss occurs in regions that had recent booms in hiring, rather than facilitating adjustment to secular regional decline, in which hiring booms occurred in the more distant past.

We estimate the effect of a female employee giving birth and taking parental leave on small firms and coworkers in Denmark using a dynamic difference-in-differences design. We find little evidence that parental leave take-up has negative effects on firms and coworkers overall. This is because most firms are very effective in compensating for the worker on leave by hiring temporary workers and by increasing other employees’ hours. In contrast, we do find evidence that parental leave has negative effects on a small subsample of firms which are less able to use their existing employees to compensate for absent workers.

In the battle against unethical behavior in organizations, fostering employees' moral courage proves vital beyond conventional regulation and compliance efforts. To propel this frontier and empower individuals to uphold moral values, a robust measure of workplace moral courage becomes imperative. Drawing upon a competency-based approach, this paper introduces the Workplace Moral Courage Scale (WMCS). Unlike previous measures, the WMCS stands out by acknowledging the diverse ways in which moral courage can manifest within workplace settings. Building on data of two diverse German employee samples (total N = 995), we unveil five distinct factors: challenging colleague and supervisor misconduct, opposing unethical orders, confessing mistakes, and initiating positive changes. The WMCS exhibits good psychometric properties and convergent and discriminant validity. Confirming its concurrent validity, the WMCS effectively predicts various forms of employee silence, even after controlling for organizational influences. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and implications of the WMCS.

Moral sensitivity is one of the most important educational goals in the ethical domain. This paper offers a first review of attempts to train moral sensitivity from 1979 to 2018, including 45 studies. The studies were reviewed using a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses. Our results show that longer courses are generally more successful in fostering moral sensitivity. However, this effect is relatively small. What ultimately appears to have mattered most, was whether learners received personal feedback on their awareness to ethical issues. Training methods that appeared to be of little value in promoting moral sensitivity including problem-based learning, the discussion of papers and texts (seminars) and a strong focus on critical thinking and challenging existing perspectives. A further major implication of our results is that reviews of ethics training ought to differentiate between learning outcomes (e.g., moral sensitivity vs. reasoning).

Education is widely recognized as structuring emerging political divides between the new left and the far right (Stubager 2009; Häusermann and Kriesi 2015; Abou-Chadi and Hix 2021; Marks et al. 2022). However, there is ongoing uncertainty about the mechanism through which the education cleavage operates, particularly in the absence of mobilizing organizations. We fielded a survey in Germany in October 2022 (to be followed by Switzerland and the UK) to explore the hypothesis that patterns of social segregation by education create social networks which foster common identities, political attitudes, and voting behavior (consolidating key aspects of an emerging cleavage). We offer descriptive evidence that individuals tend to be embedded in educationally-distinct social networks. In turn, our preliminary findings show that network composition in terms of both level and field are associated with social identities, political attitudes, and vote choice, above and beyond individual educational characteristics.

When firm-level information is not available, the greenness of financial portfolios, in terms of alignment to the EU Taxonomy, and their exposure to climate-related transition risk need to be estimated with a top-down approach. We improve the accuracy of available estimates by providing country-specific coefficients for both dimensions, based on homogeneous definitions of greenness and transition risk across countries. An application on confidential data from the European Central Bank shows that the exposure to transition risk of less regulated financial institutions has more than tripled from 2014 to 2023. Moreover, we show that the levels of Taxonomy alignment and transition risk exposure are largely heterogeneous across countries and sectors.