ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Zusammenfassung Im September 2023 stellte die CDU das Konzept der „Aktiv-Rente“ vor. Die Idee dahinter ist, den Arbeitsverdienst von Rentnerinnen und Rentnern, die neben dem Bezug einer gesetzlichen Rente eine bezahlte Beschäftigung aufnehmen, bis zu 2.000 Euro pro Monat steuerfrei zu stellen. Diese Steuerbefreiung soll unter anderem die Arbeitsanreize verbessern sowie dem Fachkräftemangel entgegenwirken. Eduard Brüll, Friedhelm Pfeiffer und Nicolas R. Ziebarth quantifizieren die möglichen Auswirkungen der Aktivrente auf die Beschäftigung von Rentnerinnen und Rentnern sowie auf die Nettoeinkommen der beschäftigten Ruheständler im Alter von 63 bis 73 Jahren auf der Basis von Stichproben des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) von 2019. Weil die verfügbaren Einkommen durch eine Aktivrente im Mittel um 5,5 Prozent stiegen, würden nach ihrer Analyse 5.000 bis 15.000 Ruheständler zusätzlich arbeiten. Mithin könne eine Aktivrente selbst unter optimistischen Annahmen dem Fachkräftemangel aus gesamtwirtschaftlicher Sicht wohl nur in begrenztem Umfang entgegenwirken. Außerdem gebe es mögliche unerwünschte Nebenwirkungen.

Introduction Teleworking is one of the most significant legacies of the pandemic. Great attention is now being paid to its effects on workers’ health. One of the arguments that emerged on this issue is that ‘working away from the office’ affects the time we spend with significant others. This calls into question all those processes that make relatives and colleagues important to our health, such as forms of mentoring and social support, but also conflicts, work interruptions or control over workers’ activities. So far, no study has evaluated the impact that teleworking has on these processes using data on personal networks. The Empty Office is the first study to use social network analysis to measure the impact that telework has on social relations and, in turn, workers’ health and well-being. Methods and analysis. The project draws on a total sample of 4400 participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany (n=1100 per country). The choice of these countries is due to their specificity and diversity in socioeconomic features, which make them particularly interesting for studying teleworking from a comparative point of view. The research is conceived as a sequential mixed-method design. First, quantitative data collection will administer an online questionnaire to gather information on telework modalities, health and well-being markers, and data on personal networks collected by a name generator. A qualitative module, administered one year later, will consist of in-depth interviews with a subsample (n=32) of teleworkers selected for delving narratively into the mechanisms identified with the quantitative analyses.

Digitization has captured many areas of the economy. This chapter deals with what is special about digitization from an economic perspective and how digitization affects the national economy. The first thing to mention would be the dynamics, which set digitization apart from other developments, such as electrification. Accompanying structural changes have to be managed in a short time, which further intensifies them. The second peculiarity is the ubiquitous data. Increasing amounts of data are used to optimize processes or even measure individuals. This has advantages, such as more efficient production routes, but can also have negative consequences, for example in the insurance of individuals. The third peculiarity is the increased emergence of platform markets. Whether platforms like eBay or Airbnb or social media platforms like Facebook or Snapchat—these are among the biggest winners of the digital transformation. Often the services on one side are offered at zero prices, which makes their regulation difficult for competition authorities. In addition, data has become a means of payment, in response to which the Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB) was revised. However, one puzzle remains: The expected efficiency gains in production are not visible in the traditional measures of productivity.

Whether firms founded during or outside economic crises have greater growth potential is an important question for both prospective entrepreneurs and policy makers. Existing research offers conflicting answers, and mostly either focuses on aggregate cohort-level effects or selectively excludes small new firms from the analyses. Using extensive linked employer-employee data on young German firms around and during the Global Financial Crisis, a period of sharply reduced access to external capital and recession, we show that young firms respond to cyclical conditions in highly heterogeneous ways. Our firm-level results reveal that the average new firm found it easier to hire its first employees when it was founded during the crisis. These firms achieved countercyclical growth by hiring career entrants. More specifically, hiring in very young (<1.5 years) and small to medium-sized (below the 90th percentile) young firms was countercyclical, while this was not the case for older and larger young firms. Thus, the firm-specific effects for young entrepreneurial firms may be very different from those reported in previous research. Our results suggest that market entry during a crisis may facilitate hiring and that policies that promote entrepreneurship may usefully complement policies that encourage labor hoarding by incumbents during recessions.

This study investigates the retention rate of young people in firms that offer apprenticeship positions. While the majority of training firms hire apprentices with the aim of retaining them when the contract ends, only a small proportion of youths actually transition into full-time employment in the same firm. To explain this phenomenon, I rely on a tractable model that incorporates firm decision-making processes, enabling an analysis of the retention rate. By estimating the productivity distribution of apprentices based on observed wage data from French surveys, the findings indicate that training firms, on average, benefit more from separating from apprentices rather than hiring them as workers.

Using microsimulations, we project the effect of instructional losses caused by COVID-19 on secondary school completion rates and intergenerational mobility of education in eight countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. On average, secondary school completion rates could decrease by 12 percentage points overall and by 16 points for children with low-educated parents. Interestingly, in most countries the gender gap diminishes because, for men, the projected decrease in secondary school completion is higher. A small additional impact on girls’ education due to the potential rise in teenage pregnancy is observed in some countries. Intergenerational mobility of education in the eight Sub-Saharan countries in our sample is expected to decrease, on average, by 10%.

This paper shows that nineteenth-century industrialization is an essential determinant of the pronounced changes in economic prosperity across German regions over the last 100 years. Using novel data on economic activity in 163 labor market regions in West Germany, we find that nearly half of them experienced a reversal of fortune, moving from the lower to the upper median of the income distribution or vice versa, between 1926 and 2019. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in access to coal, we show that early industrialization led to a massive decline in the per capita income rank after World War II, as it turned from an asset to economic development into a liability. We present evidence consistent with the view that early industrialization created a lopsided economic structure dominated by large firms, which reduced adaptive capacity and local innovation. The (time-varying) effect of industrialization explains most of the decline in regional inequality observed in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and more than half of the current North-South gap in economic development.

In this article, we study whether performance evaluations can serve as an instrument for firms to increase employee retention. Feedback on one's own performance may affect individual turnover intentions differently depending on the relative wage rank of workers among their peers. In line with these considerations, empirical evidence based on panel employer–employee data shows that relatively low‐paid employees decrease their turnover intentions after the implementation of a performance evaluation system at the establishment level. We find no effect for relatively high‐paid employees.

Business creation is economically important, and unemployment precedes the creation of a substantial share of new firms. Yet, most research has focused on analyzing the effects of unemployment insurance policies on re-employment outcomes, ignoring self-employment. In this paper, we analyze how the potential duration of unemployment benefits, a fundamental design choice of unemployment insurance systems, affects whether new firms are founded out of opportunity or necessity and their growth potential. To this end, we construct a comprehensive dataset on German firm founders that links administrative social insurance information with business survey data. Exploiting reform and age-related exogenous variation in the potential duration of unemployment benefits, we find that longer potential benefit duration implies longer actual unemployment and, as a consequence, more necessity entrepreneurship and worse startup outcomes in terms of sales and employment growth. We explain this overall effect of potential benefit duration through a mix of compositional and individual-level duration effects. Our findings underline that new firms started out of unemployment are a highly heterogeneous group and suggest that the (optimal) design of unemployment insurance systems has important externalities on whether innovation- and growth-oriented firms are started out of unemployment.

We investigate whether strengthened legal protection of trade secrets increases the likelihood of a firm being acquired. Stronger protection can make a firm more attractive for acquisition because of better safeguarding of trade secrets, but it may also increase information asymmetries that discourage potential acquirers. Using the staggered implementation of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act in the United States, we show that stronger trade secret protection increases the likelihood of being acquired but also changes firms’ acquisition strategies more broadly depending on the distance between acquirer and target. Compared with domestic acquirers, foreign acquirers are only half as likely to make an acquisition, and they prefer to acquire minority rather than majority stakes. Both domestic and foreign acquirers are more likely to pursue stepwise acquisitions of a target as protection increases, consistent with a real options rationale. Further investigation suggests that, whereas increased trade secret protection increases information asymmetries for all acquirers, foreign acquirers as well as domestic acquirers located further away from a target are disproportionately affected. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2023.0066 .

Climate policy aims to reduce emissions by redirecting investment from emission-intensive toward carbon-neutral assets. One key instrument, carbon pricing, guides investors and asset managers by lowering the return of fossil fuel-related assets. This chapter reviews three key mechanisms on how sustainable finance can support climate policy: first, providing investors with the necessary information to factor climate risk into their investment and portfolio decisions; second, building awareness for sustainable investing by differentiated means for institutional investors and retail investors; and, finally, addressing the cost of capital as an obstacle to low-carbon investments. For each, we critically review opportunities and shortcomings based on recent research and draw up recommendations for investors and policymakers.

Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross-country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.

We explore the possibility of designing matching mechanisms that can accommodate nonstandard choice behavior. We pin down the necessary and sufficient conditions on participants' choice behavior for the existence of stable and incentive‐compatible mechanisms. Our results imply that well‐functioning matching markets can be designed to adequately accommodate a plethora of choice behaviors, including the standard behavior consistent with preference maximization. To illustrate the significance of our results in practice, we show that a simple modification in a commonly used matching mechanism enables it to accommodate nonstandard choice behavior.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform medicine, but the geographic concentration of AI expertize may hinder its equitable application. We analyze 397,967 AI life science research publications from 2000 to 2022 and 14.5 million associated citations, creating a global atlas that distinguishes productivity (i.e., publications), quality-adjusted productivity (i.e., publications stratified by field-normalized rankings of publishing outlets), and relevance (i.e., citations). While Asia leads in total publications, Northern America and Europe contribute most of the AI research appearing in high-ranking outlets, generating up to 50% more citations than other regions. At the global level, international collaborations produce more impactful research, but have stagnated relative to national research efforts. Our findings suggest that greater integration of global expertize could help AI deliver on its promise and contribute to better global health.

We examine the costs associated with public disclosure, as opposed to confidential reporting, of tax country‐by‐country reporting (CbCR) information. Our study addresses a critical knowledge gap, considering the growing adoption of public tax transparency measures. We aim to illuminate this matter by examining the expected costs for firms of making previously confidential CbCR information publicly available. The fact that the information was previously confidentially reported to the tax authorities allows us to assess the cost of publication in isolation. Employing an event study methodology, we provide early evidence on the capital market reaction to this new requirement on a sample of European firms falling within its scope. We document a significantly negative cumulative average abnormal return of EUR 47 billion to 64 billion for up to 3 days following the announcement. Additional cross‐sectional results suggest that concerns about the reputational costs arising from public scrutiny and the proprietary costs from disclosing sensitive business information outweigh the potential benefits of an extended information environment from an investor perspective. Our findings highlight that the public disclosure of tax information imposes significant—and likely unintended—costs from a firm perspective. This aspect should be carefully considered when developing tax transparency measures.