Jan Paul Heisig

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Head of Department at WZB Berlin Social Science Center

This study investigates researcher variability in computational reproduction, an activity for which it is least expected. Eighty-five independent teams attempted numerical replication of results from an original study of policy preferences and immigration. Reproduction teams were randomly grouped into a ‘transparent group’ receiving original study...

Background Disparities in the development of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) are associated with various social determinants, including sex/gender, migration background, living arrangement, education, and household income. This study applied an intersectional perspective to map social disparities and investigate intersectional effects regarding the onset of...

Objectives In aging societies, more people become vulnerable to experiencing cognitive decline. Simultaneously, the role of grandparenthood is central for older adults and their families. Our study investigates inequalities in the level and trajectories of cognitive functioning among older adults, focusing on possible intersectional effects of soci...

This article addresses the labour market challenges faced by adults with low formal qualifications. While low-level formal qualifications are usually associated with a lower skill level, it is crucial to recognise the large heterogeneity of skills within the group of low-qualified individuals in all countries. Although better skills enhance the job...

Objectives With aging societies, more people become vulnerable to experiencing cognitive decline. While normal aging is associated with a deterioration in certain cognitive abilities, little is known about how social determinants intersect to create late-life cognitive functioning inequalities. Simultaneously, the role of grandparenthood is central...

Background: Disparities in the development of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) are associated with various social determinants, including sex/gender, migration background, living arrangement, education, and household income. However, few quantitative studies have applied an intersectional perspective to examine non-additive effects of overlapping social ident...

In this article we report evidence from a series of semi-structured interviews with a broad sample of people living in Denmark ( n = 21), about their perspectives on the future during the first months of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The thematic and discursive analyses, based on an abductive ontology, illustrate imaginings of the future along two...

Less-educated workers have the lowest participation rates in job-related further training across the industrialized world, but the extent of their disadvantage varies. Using data on 28 high- and middle-income countries, we assess different explanations for less-educated workers’ training disadvantage relative to intermediate-educated workers, with...

Trust is highlighted as central to effective disease management. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Denmark seemed to embody this understanding. Characterizing the Danish response were high levels of public compliance with government regulations and restrictions coupled with high trust in the government and other members of society. In this article, we...

This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in...

Background Previous studies have shown that national cultural traits, such as collectivism–individualism and tightness–looseness, are associated with COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. However, although East Asian countries have outperformed other countries in containing COVID-19 infections and lowering mortality in the first pandemic waves, n...

In a recent contribution to this journal, Esser and Seuring (2020) draw on data from the National Educational Panel Study to attack the widespread view that tracking in lower secondary education exacerbates inequalities in student outcomes without improving average student performance. Exploiting variation in the strictness of tracking across 13 of...

The „Representative Survey on the Participation of People with Disabilities“ (short: participation survey) is the largest nationwide representative survey on the participation of people with disabilities in Germany. The aim of the study is to gain information about the life situations and participation opportunities of people with impairments or di...

In a recent contribution, Esser and Seuring (2020) draw on data from the National Educational Panel Study to attack the widespread view that tracking in lower secondary education exacerbates inequalities in student outcomes without improving average student performance. Exploiting variation in the strictness of tracking across 13 of the 16 German f...

Health Data as a Public Good. Routine health data, which are collected by health insurers and other agencies in the health care system, offer enormous potential for health monitoring and research. Germany has been slow to make such data available for socially beneficial purposes, partly due to concerns about privacy and data protection. Against thi...

Zusammenfassung Die Auswirkungen der Corona-Pandemie gehen weit über die gesundheitlichen Risiken einer Infektion mit SARS-CoV-2 hinaus. Der vorliegende Beitrag fasst empirische Befunde zu vier zentralen Risikofaktoren für die psychische Gesundheit Erwachsener zusammen: 1) gesundheitliche Ängste und Sorgen; 2) Einsamkeit und soziale Isolation; 3) w...

Why do some fields of study in higher education yield higher wage returns in the labor market than others? Human capital perspectives suggest that differences in skills are a major source of between-fields wage differentials. We assess this explanation using data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Our...

The paper reports findings from a crowdsourced replication. Eighty-four replicator teams attempted to verify results reported in an original study by running the same models with the same data. The replication involved an experimental condition. A “transparent” group received the original study and code, and an “opaque” group received the same unde...

This paper reports findings from a crowdsourced replication. Eighty-five independent teams attempted a computational replication of results reported in an original study of policy preferences and immigration by fitting the same statistical models to the same data. The replication involved an experimental condition. Random assignment put participati...

Findings from 162 researchers in 73 teams testing the same hypothesis with the same data reveal a universe of unique analytical possibilities leading to a broad range of results and conclusions. Surprisingly, the outcome variance mostly cannot be explained by variations in researchers’ modeling decisions or prior beliefs. Each of the 1,261 test mod...

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to include conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis and that may lead to diverging results. We coordinated 16...

Research shows that children of immigrants, the “second generation,” have comparatively high educational aspirations. This “immigrant optimism” translates into ambitious educational choices, given the second generation’s level of academic performance. Choice-driven (comprehensive) education systems, which allow the children of immigrants to follow...

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inf...

Rejoinder to Daniel Stegmueller's Comments - Martin Elff, Jan Paul Heisig, Merlin Schaeffer, Susumu Shikano

We use PIAAC data to study the relationship between parental education and educational success among adults from 23 advanced economies. We consider educational success in terms of both educational attainment (formal qualifications) and educational achievement (competencies) and in both absolute and relative terms (i.e. as the individual’s rank in t...

We use PIAAC data on the literacy and numeracy skills of 49,366 25-to-54-year-olds in 27 countries to shed new light on cross-national variation in the labor market disadvantage of less-educated adults (i.e., those who have not completed upper secondary education). Our empirical analysis focuses on the occupational status gap between less-educated...

Mixed-effects multilevel models are often used to investigate cross-level interactions, a specific type of context effect that may be understood as an upper-level variable moderating the association between a lower-level predictor and the outcome. We argue that multilevel models involving cross-level interactions should always include random slopes...

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of sele...

Abstract Background By providing high-quality, internationally comparable data on the cognitive skills of working-age adults, the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) offers great potential for illuminating the complex interplay of formal qualifications and skills in shaping labor market attainment as well as soc...

Mixed effects multilevel models are often used to investigate cross-level interactions, a specific type of context effect that may be understood as an upper-level variable moderating the association between a lower-level predictor and the outcome. We argue that multilevel models involving cross-level interactions should always include random slopes...

Mixed effects multilevel models are often used to investigate cross-level interactions, a specific type of context effect that may be understood as an upper-level variable moderating the association between a lower-level predictor and the outcome. We argue that multilevel models involving cross-level interactions should always include random slopes...

Context effects, where a characteristic of an upper-level unit or cluster (e.g., a country) affects outcomes and relationships at a lower level (e.g., that of the individual), are a primary object of sociological inquiry. In recent years, sociologists have increasingly analyzed such effects using quantitative multilevel modeling. Our review of mult...

Previous research unequivocally shows that immigrants are less successful in the labour market than the native-born population. However, little is known about whether ethnic inequality persists after retirement. We use data on 16 Western European countries from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, 2004–2013) to pr...

Despite a growing interest in the effects of job loss, research on its consequences for older workers and their economic situation in retirement remains scant. Using 30 years of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we examine the incidence and consequences of job loss at ages 50 to 64, following displaced workers for up to 10 years aft...

Comparative political science has long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Exacerbating these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that frequentist methods yield biased estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with small upper-level samples....

Less-educated adults bear the highest risk of labor market marginalization in all advanced economies, but the extent of their disadvantage differs considerably across countries. Exploiting unique data on the actual skills of adults from PIAAC 2011/12, we examine two prominent explanations for this cross-country variation. Human capital theory sugge...

Domestic technologies have advanced and diffused enormously over the last two centuries. In the richest economies access to reliable public utilities has been practically universal for many decades and the vast majority of households now possess a large set of domestic appliances. There is a broad consensus that this development has fundamentally c...

Pension reform has featured high on the agenda of OECD countries in recent decades. As a result of growing life expectancy and low fertility rates, most member countries are already experiencing declines in the size of the working-age population relative to the older population, and this trend is set to continue into the future. One of the more ser...

We investigate the impact of external differentiation and vocational orientation of (lower and upper) secondary education on country variation in the mean numeracy skills of, and skills gaps between, adults with low and intermediate formal qualifications. We use data on 30- to 44-year-olds in 18 countries from the 2011-12 round of the Program for t...

Context effects, where a characteristic of a higher-level unit or “cluster” (e.g., a country) affects outcomes and relationships at a lower level (e.g., that of the individual), are a primary object of sociological inquiry. During recent decades, sociologists have increasingly investigated context effects using quantitative methods. We show that qu...

Motivated by debates about welfare state retrenchment and growing economic insecurity, this book takes a closer look at the situation of older workers in Germany and the US. It first provides an in-depth account of country differences in key social programs - and of crucial changes since the 1980s. To better understand the impact of these changes o...

During recent decades, earnings differentials between educational groups have risen in most advanced economies. While these trends are well-documented, much less is known about inequality trends within educational groups. To address this issue, we study changes in labor market inequalities among low-skilled men in West Germany. Using data from the...

Social scientists generally rely on three broad modelling strategies to test hypotheses about contextual effects: random intercept and slope (often simply referred to as “multilevel”) models, pooled OLS with cluster-robust standard errors, and two-step approaches. Econometric textbooks tell us that while random intercept and slope models are the mo...

Es wird untersucht, in welchem Maße die Ereignisse „Arbeitsplatzverlust“, „Krankheit“, „Verrentung“ und „Familientrennung“ in Deutschland und den USA zu Armut führen, und ob sich die Ereignisfolgen zwischen 1980 und 2009 verändert haben. In den USA wird zunächst ein größerer Teil der betroffenen Personen arm als in Deutschland. Allerdings erholen s...

We use the Socio-Economic Panel to study how the job-shift patterns of West German workers changed between 1984 and 2008, analyzing trends separately by gender, education, labor force experience, firm size, and sector. We document a considerable reduction in the rate of within-firm job changes, especially for men in large companies and with limited...

This article studies the relationship between household income and housework time across 33 countries. In most countries, low-income individuals do more housework than their high-income counterparts; the differences are even greater for women’s domestic work time. The analysis shows that the difference between rich and poor women’s housework time f...

The German Hartz reforms, introduced by the Red-Green coalition government in the years 2003 to 2005, form part of a broader pattern of European activation policies which have become known as new labour policies. The idea of these reforms was to reduce welfare dependency and to boost activity rates by making work pay, and by transforming the welfar...

We contribute to the long-standing debate about an alleged “destabilization” and “destandardization” of employment biographies by analyzing how the job-shift patterns of West German workers have changed between 1984 and 2008. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we study changes in the rates of (upward) within- and between-firm mobility...

"Angesichts anhaltend hoher und jüngst wieder steigender Arbeitslosenzahlen ist die Bekämpfung der Arbeitslosigkeit ein herausragendes Ziel deutscher wie europäischer Politik. Dabei ist es mit den „Hartz-Reformen“ der Jahre 2003 bis 2005 zuletzt zu den tiefstgreifenden arbeitsmarkt- und sozialpolitischen Veränderungen in der deutschen Nachkriegsges...