TY - THES A1 - Stoll, Julius T1 - Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics: A Microeconomic Study of Snacks, Beer, and Real Estate Agents N2 - This dissertation comprises three essays. Although their titles make clear their self-contained nature, all essays share a common motivation: to combine economic theory with modern tools of causal inference to understand applied problems. The first chapter studies honesty when the costs to behave honestly change. Using field data from a snack delivery company that employs an honesty payment system, the chapter presents an event study to analyze how price increases affect pay rates. The honesty payment system expects customers to pay a listed price for each consumed snack. This allows me to measure honesty with the pay rate that compares consumption to payments. The results, which draw on deliveries from several thousand firms, show that price increases that make honest behavior more costly cause more cheating. Price increases of 15% trigger a fall in pay rates of 11%. The second chapter studies a recent legal reform in Germany, which aims to lower commission rates of real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform has backfired and real estate agents have exploited the transition to increase their commission rates. The findings document that in some regions real estate agents increase their commission by up to 2 percentage points, adding over e6,000 in transaction cost to the average home sale. As explicit collusion is unlikely in this setting, I argue that this arbitrary increase points to seller ignorance instead. To verify if and why sellers fail to induce price competition, I run a pre-registered survey experiment with 1,062 real estate agents. Although commission rates should be negotiated independently for each sale, the survey confirms that 85% of sellers do not attempt to negotiate lower commission rates. The randomized experimental questions suggest that real estate agents may cater to the low willingness of sellers to negotiate by providing misleading reference commission rates and shrouding the economic incidence for sellers. The third chapter is co-authored with Christian Traxler and Carsten Burhop and examines the causal effect of beer on crime based on unique panel data from Germany between 1882 and 1913. Using exogenous variation in the yield of spring barley, a key input in beer production, we identify a quantitatively and qualitatively significant effect of beer on violent crimes. This effect is mainly driven by a positive effect on assaults, where our findings suggest that a 1% increase in beer production raises assault rates by the same percentage. These findings are corroborated using a complementary empirical design that exploits a brewing tax reform in Prussia. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2024 Y1 - 2024 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-53268 N1 - List of publications Stoll, J. (2022). The cost of honesty: Field evidence. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 101, 101943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2022.101943 Stoll, J. (2023). How not to reduce commission rates of real estate agents: Evidence from Germany. Berlin School of Economics (Discussion Paper No. 26). https://doi.org/10.48462/OPUS4-5077 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D003 + 2024D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Uttenthal, Maria T1 - Trust in democratic societies: A conceptual, methodological, and empirical contribution N2 - This thesis is a comprehensive study of trust. The study rests on the argument that all forms of trust stem from the same universal concept. Once trust has been defined at its core, the concept can be specified within a wide variety of contexts, such as trust in your friends and family, in your fellow citizens, or in different kinds of institutions within your country. Although trust is an increasingly popular topic within the social sciences, a lack of consensus on the true meaning of the concept remains. One the one hand, this can be attributed to diverging conceptualisations in a rich and multidisciplinary conceptual literature. On the other, to empirical studies where quantifiable measures do not spring from a clear conceptual account, but rather take survey responses directly at face value. Based on this fundamental issue, the overarching goal of my thesis is to bridge the gap between the conceptual and empirical literature. I achieve this goal with three contributions. Firstly, I conduct a conceptual analysis of trust, which results in a unifying conceptual framework. The framework acknowledges and combines different conceptual understandings from political science, psychology and sociology, thereby representing a move towards clearer consensus on the meaning of trust within the conceptual literature. Secondly, I develop a new measurement model for trust, which is directly rooted in the conceptual framework. The model reflects an alternative approach to empirical research, where quantitative measures of trust are derived from a conceptual argument on the appropriate structure and dimensionality. Thirdly, I identify a typology of citizens who trust in fundamentally different ways. The typology acts as a complementary perspective on the meaning of trust, studied from the viewpoint of citizens in a heterogeneous population. As a whole, I argue that the thesis represents a new approach to trust research, where conceptual and empirical methods are closely intertwined. In order to advance our understanding of this fundamentally important concept, it is crucial to bring the two strands of the literature closer together. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2024 Y1 - 2024 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-52159 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D002 + 2024D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Mones, Haytham T1 - Unveiling the Dynamics of Public Value Creation on Social Media: A New Zealand Perspective N2 - In the past decade, social media has revolutionized how governments create public value through online communication and collaboration with citizens. Despite this, academic literature still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how public value is disseminated via social media. This research delves into the process of public value creation on social media in New Zealand, a leading country in leveraging social media for government-to-citizen communication, particularly during crises. The study seeks to answer two questions about creating or eroding public value over social media. The first question investigates the socio-demographic factors correlating with citizens' varying perceptions of public value from social media adoption. The findings suggest that citizens with similar public value perceptions share common socio-demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, education, trust in government, platform usage, and following government accounts. The study also reveals differences in public value perceptions based on the platform type, with platforms like Twitter garnering more positive public value perceptions than Facebook. The second question examines how using social media in government can enhance or diminish public value perceptions among citizens. The research constructs a causal model where specific social media practices during peaceful and crisis times, along with the engagement of external stakeholders, lead to increased perceptions of public value creation. The study also uncovers two causal mechanisms for the erosion of public value. In the first model, government reactions to opposing opinions on social media, such as hiding or removing comments, result in low public value perceptions. The second model shows that over-posting or posting irrelevant information can reduce citizens’ trust in the government, limit government posts' reach, and lower public value perception. This research encourages future studies to replicate the experiment across various platforms and countries to better understand how public value can be created or eroded over social media. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2024 Y1 - 2024 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-52099 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D001 + 2024D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Lindemann, Korinna O. T1 - The Indelible Past: The Effects of Authoritarianism on Political Behaviour T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 11/2023 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-51975 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D011 + 2023D011+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Nicolaides, Panayiotis T1 - Essays on the Economics of Taxation T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 10/2023 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-51510 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D010 + 2023D010+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Sgarlato, Raffaele T1 - Weather-driven electricity systems T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 09/2023 Y1 - 2023 N1 - List of publications: Sgarlato, R., & Ziel, F. (2023). The role of weather predictions in electricity price forecasting beyond the day-ahead horizon. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 38(3), 2500–2511. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPWRS.2022.3180119 Sgarlato, R. (2023). Statistical electricity price forecasting: A structural approach. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2306.14186 Tiedemann, S., Sgarlato, R., & Hirth, L. (2023). Price elasticity of electricity demand: Using instrumental variable regressions to address endogeneity and autocorrelation of high-frequency time series. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2306.12863 Ruhnau, O., Eicke, A., Sgarlato, R., Tröndle, T., & Hirth, L. (2022). Cost-potential curves of onshore wind energy: The role of disamenity costs. Environmental and Resource Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-022-00746-2 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D009 + 2023D009+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Oswald, Lisa T1 - Public Discourse in Online Environments. Contributions to description, measurement and communication behavior change in political online ecosystems N2 - The public discourse is an essential element of democracy. Today, political information consumption is largely mediated through digital technologies and important political discussions have moved to online platforms. This dissertation examines different elements and dynamics of the online public discourse within five research articles. First, a systematic review synthesizes evidence on the broader relationship between digital media and democracy, which highly depends on political context. While most beneficial effects of information access and political participation can be found in autocratic regimes and emerging democracies, there is more reason for concern in established democracies where negative effects on political trust, populism and polarization accumulate. Next, using digital trace data combined with survey data to zoom into the political information ecosystem in Germany, I find that it consists of far more than news media, but that in-depth political discussions also take place in seemingly unpolitical niches of the internet. While the user base of online public broadcasting consists of a comparably narrow audience, most citizens consume political content via mainstream information hubs that can provide a common basis for public discourse. The most predictive variable for selection into political information consumption is political knowledge, not partisanship. However, people who actively write comments online show more extreme political opinions, highlighting differences between active and passive political engagement online. This differential selection pattern is further mirrored in the final project, where high levels of social media activity also relate to stronger comment toxicity. An agenda to reduce online toxicity requires an efficient method to measure the quality of online discussions. Using discussion data from Reddit, I compare simple computational measures to manual content coding and find that an automated toxicity classifier combined with the length of comments corresponds to established indicators of deliberative quality. I then develop a preemptive strategy with the aim to reduce toxicity in political discussions among highly active social media users. Testing various behavioral interventions, I find that simple ‘nudges’ in the user interface do not reduce the toxicity of comments. However, mixed findings on a more complex ‘boosting’ intervention, explaining the role of empathy and perspective taking for political discussions, evince opportunities to open up online public discourse for those who may otherwise be silenced by high levels of toxicity. Especially when combined with established approaches of survey methodology and content analysis, computational social science commands many tools to map elements and dynamics of the online public discourse from a holistic perspective. This does not only bear potential to reconnect theoretical ideals of the public sphere with real life online, but it also enables the generation of evidence for policymakers and civil society to keep up with the pace of the fast moving target of digital media. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2023 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50666 N1 - List of publications 1. Lorenz-Spreen, P., Oswald, L., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1 2. Oswald, L. (2022). More than news! Mapping the deliberative potential of a political online ecosystem with digital trace data. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/68udg 3. Oswald, L., Munzert, S., Barberá, P., Guess, A., & Yang, J. (2022). Beyond the tip of the iceberg? Exploring characteristics of the online public with digital trace data. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yfmzh 4. Oswald, L. (2022). Automating the analysis of online deliberation? A comparison of manual and computational measures applied to climate change discussions. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/qmzwx 5. Oswald, L. (2023). Effects of preemptive empathy interventions on reply toxicity among highly active social media users. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/evdxy N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D008 + 2023D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Brüggmann, Daniel T1 - Consequences of Divorce in Germany N2 - This cumulative dissertation investigates the economic consequences of divorce in Germany. It includes a general introduction (Chapter 1), three research papers (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) and one article that validates the data quality (Chapter 5). The analysis is based on register data from the statutory German pension fund. The data provide not only large sample sizes but also detailed earnings, employment and marital histories of the divorcees. On the basis of these data, the (causal) effects of divorce on employment, health and earnings are examined by relying on the propensity score framework. However, because propensity scores are sensible to the estimation strategy and the observed covariates, robustness checks with alternative estimation frameworks are also performed. Finally, to address the issue of hidden bias, estimated results are also challenged by sensitivity analyses. The results may be summarised as follows: Among other strategies, women can cope with economic strain connected with divorce by increasing their labor supply and/or by earning higher incomes (compared to their married counterparts). While the income effect is negligible, the employment effect is very pronounced. I find particularly strong negative employment effects with respect to marginal employment and strong positive effects with respect to regular employment. Furthermore, the lower the labour market attachment before separation, the more pronounced the employment effect. Aside from labour market outcomes, health (measured in days of work disability) also declined considerably around the time of separation. However, I demonstrate that a naïve descriptive investigation would overestimate the effect of divorce on health because there is substantial selection into divorce. Thus, poor health is not only a cause of divorce but also a pathway to divorce. Lastly, the data set allowed me to link former couples and examine their employment and earning trajectories across divorce. Results indicate that women’s earnings increased in the years around divorce, whereas their ex-partner’s earnings declined. Nevertheless, huge gender differences persist. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2023 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50610 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 2: Women’s employment, income and divorce in West Germany: A causal approach. The version of record of this article, first published in Journal for Labour Market Research, is available online at Publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12651-020-00270-0 Brüggmann, D. (2020). Women’s employment, income and divorce in West Germany: A causal approach. Journal for Labour Market Research, 54(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12651-020-00270-0 Chapter 3: Earnings Trajectories after Divorce: The Legacies of the Earner Model during Marriage. The version of record of this article, first published in Population Research and Policy Review, is available online at Publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09756-4 Brüggmann, D., & Kreyenfeld, M. (2023). Earnings Trajectories After Divorce: The Legacies of the Earner Model During Marriage. Population Research and Policy Review, 42(2), 23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09756-4 Chapter 4: Work disability and divorce. Published in: Brüggmann, D. (2020). Work Disability and Divorce. In M. Kreyenfeld & H. Trappe (Eds.), Parental Life Courses after Separation and Divorce in Europe (pp. 289–308). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44575-1_14 Chapter 5: Statutory Pension Insurance Accounts and divorce: A new scientific use file. The final publication is available at www.degruyter.com. Keck, W., Radenacker, A., Brüggmann, D., Kreyenfeld, M., & Mika, T. (2020). Statutory Pension Insurance Accounts and Divorce: A New Scientific Use File. Jahrbücher Für Nationalökonomie Und Statistik, 240(6), 825–835. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2019-0064 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D007 + 2023D007+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Darius, Philipp T1 - Are social media platforms accelerators of democratic fragmentation? An inquiry into the relationship of democratic fragmentation and social media platforms in three political arenas: political campaigns, protest movements and democratic institutions N2 - Whilst social media platforms provide global communication environments, these platforms are not primarily designed for political debates. This may have adverse effects on democracy and contribute to democratic fragmentation. This dissertation project investigates the role of social media platforms as potential accelerators of fragmentation in established democracies. The overarching question of this dissertation explores to what extent social media platforms may contribute to fragmentation that may result in the erosion of democracy. This dissertation comprises three articles focusing on three political arenas 1) political campaigns, 2) protest movements, and 3) democratic institutions. The first paper investigates the polarisation of online political behaviour on Twitter in democratic election campaigns. The analysis is based on Twitter data of German political parties and election hashtags during the final week of the 2017 and 2021 German Federal elections. The study’s findings suggest that the far-right party AfD seeks to polarise online discourse as a strategy and that far-right online partisans may influence the public reception of politicians and established parties. The second paper examines the formation of protest movements on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. The study monitors two established conspiracy narratives and their communities on Twitter, the anti-vaccination and anti-5G communities, before and during the first UK lockdown. The study finds that, despite content moderation efforts by Twitter, conspiracy groups were able to proliferate their messages and influence broader public discourses on Twitter, such as #Lockdown in the United Kingdom. The findings underline social platforms' potential for protest formation that can result in disinformed social movements. The third paper inspects social platform companies’ mimicking of democratic institutions like Meta’s oversight board for content decisions that may erode existing democratic institutions. The study traces the emergence of the supreme court metaphor for Meta’s oversight board and its use in the US News discourse. The findings emphasise how private organisations and the use of constitutional metaphors can erode the legitimacy of supreme courts and other democratic institutions. The dissertation’s findings imply that social media platforms, besides their democratically desirable function for democratic participation and deliberative potentials, contribute to democratic fragmentation in the inspected arenas of political campaigns, disinformed protest movements and democratic institutions. Thus, extended research data access is key to better understanding the social implications of social media platforms and finding adequate regulations of recommender systems, content moderation, and advertisement-based business models. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2023 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50557 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 3: Darius P (2022) “Who Polarizes Twitter? Ideological Polarisation, Partisan Groups and Strategic Networked Campaigning on Twitter during the 2017 and 2021 German Federal Elections ‘Bundestagswahlen.’” Social Network Analysis and Mining 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00958-w. The version of record of this article, first published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, is available online at the Publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00958-w Chapter 4: Darius P, Urquhart M (2021) “Disinformed Social Movements: A Large-Scale Mapping of Conspiracy Narratives as Online Harms during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Online Social Networks and Media 26: 100174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2021.100174 Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Chapter 5: Cowls J, Darius P, Santistevan D, Schramm M (2022) “Constitutional Metaphors: Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ and the Legitimation of Platform Governance.” New Media & Society, April 5, 2022, 14614448221085560. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221085559 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D006 + 2023D006+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Schmauk, Sarah T1 - Divorce and economic wellbeing. A life course perspective on the interplay of work-family lives in West Germany and Sweden N2 - This cumulative dissertation investigates the relationship between divorce and economic wellbeing from a life course perspective in West Germany and Sweden. The analyses are based on large-scale register data from the German public pension and the Swedish population registers. The first paper studies mothers’ earnings trajectories from one year before their first childbirth until ten years after in both countries. Separation negatively affects mothers’ earnings trajectories in Sweden, while it positively affects them in West Germany. In Sweden, although the earnings of separated mothers lag behind those of partnered mothers, both groups can surpass their pre-birth earnings, which is not the case for either separated or partnered mothers from western Germany. The second paper investigates how divorce relates to retirement trajectories, defined as the monthly insurance history from age 50 to age 65 of women and men in West Germany. Divorcees are more likely than married to retire through unstable retirement trajectories characterised by receipt of reduced-earnings-capacity pensions and unemployment. Whereas the relationship between divorce and retirement trajectories seems to be overall adverse for men, it is more ambiguous for women. Some divorced women are also more likely than married women to retire through a stable high-income trajectory. The third paper compares the gendered consequences of divorce on public pension income in both countries. Divorced women from West Germany have significantly higher public pension incomes than married women. The German ‘divorce splitting’ mechanism increases women’s and decreases men’s pension incomes, which contributes to equalising their public pension incomes. In Sweden, women show comparable pension incomes across marital status, although divorced women have slightly lower pension incomes, while divorced men receive approximately 26 % less pension income than married men. The dissertation illustrates that family and work life are intertwined, that they unfold gradually across the life course, and that the welfare state context shapes the interrelation of divorce and economic wellbeing: The event of divorce (and separation) not only directly impacts employment biographies of mothers but is, in a long-term perspective, related to retirement trajectories of women and men and their public pension incomes. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2023 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50499 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D005 + 2023D005+1 N1 - List of publications Schmauk, S., & Kridahl, L. (2024). Who receives most? Gendered consequences of divorce on public pension income in West Germany and Sweden. Ageing and Society, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X23000703 Schmauk, S. (2024). Pathways to retirement in West Germany: Does divorce matter? Advances in Life Course Research, 60, 100595. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2024.100595 ER -