Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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05/2019
Researchers have long inquired about the “positive” (or “good”) effects of national attachment on in-group solidarity, and its potential “negative” (or “bad”) effects on outgroup derogation. Put simply, there is a concern that while national attachment may foster solidarity and trust, it could also increase out-group derogation through nationalism or anti-immigrant sentiments. In Chapter 2, I discuss the political theory of John Rawls and introduce a realist critique of his ideal theory of social justice. I argue that national attachment and how it operates in the real world are a potential factual constraint on Rawls’ theory. This theoretical prelude frames the empirical chapters of this dissertation (Chapters 3-5), all of which study the effects of national attachment on social justice preferences. I describe this empirical perspective on national attachment and social justice as “Rawls for Realists.” In Chapter 3, I use observational data to investigate the relationship between national attachment and support of social justice principles. I show that national attachment increases support for redistribution, but only among individuals with lower levels of “Openness to Experience” (a core personality trait). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first study to combine datasets on personality, national attachment, and redistribution. In Chapter 4, I use observational data to investigate the relationship between national pride and anti-immigrant sentiments. I show that, counter to common perceptions, national pride does not increase and may, in fact, even decrease anti-immigrant sentiments among nativists, the social group most opposed to immigration. I explain this by arguing that nativists perceive immigrants as a symbolic threat to their values and norms, and not as an economic threat. As national pride increases group esteem among nativists, it reduce the perception of symbolic threats. In Chapter 5, I analyse original experimental data from a survey experiment to explore the relationship between in-group commitment and out-group derogation. A first video treatment primes only national attachment; a second treatment primes national attachment and perception of threat. I show that only the second treatment increases anti-immigrant sentiments and nationalism, suggesting the centrality of perceived threat for out-group derogation. This perceived threat treatment also increases respondents’ belief in democracy but does not affect preferences for social justice.
02/2024
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.
09/2021
The international banking regulation regime is complex. This complexity leaves room for regulatory arbitrage and boosts administrative burdens, which reduces its mitigating effect on financial instability. This book addresses the question on why states agree on such a potentially inefficient regime. First, it evaluates research on international banking regulation negotiations, which either neglect complexity or offer insufficient functionalist regulatory capture arguments for its emergence.
Second, it proposes an economic cost-benefit model that explains complexity in international banking regulation as a function of diverging preferences in multipolar negotiations. This is based on an outcome-based definition of complexity: regimes that yield a set of different potential outcomes for the same banks are complex. The degree of complexity is described by a regulatory corridor whose walls are the boundaries of this set. The larger such a corridor, the more costly are its implications in terms of stability but its boundaries come closer to the preferences of signatories. Based on this assumed trade-off, three main claims are derived: (i) states with diverging preferences will introduce at least some complexity in their multinational regulatory regime, as a regulatory corridors-solution allows at least one of them to come closer to their initial preferences, which is individually welfare-enhancing; (ii) this is not only a collective action problem, as a central planner would also introduce complexity (potentially to a different extent); and (iii) this holds in an intertemporal case with an infinite time-horizon; changing expectations might widen the optimal regulatory corridor.
Third, these claims are evaluated in three qualitative case studies on the treatment of operational risk in Basel II, the implementation of Basel III capital requirements in the European Union, and the European bank resolution regime. They find support for propositions (i) and (ii). Other methods might be needed to evaluate (iii).
A policy-relevant result of this research is that some degree of complexity can contribute to welfare-enhancement. Complexity that is the result of unmanaged collective action by states could reduce collective welfare while still being individually rational. Regulators should treat complexity as a variable in negotiations to achieve the former and avoid the latter.
16/2021
The European Union (EU), though a treaty between states, is different from previous international organisations in the depth and breadth of its aims. Termed a supranational organisation, it seeks not only to work in the common interest of its 27 member states, but in the general interest of the Union. Scholars of EU studies have long debated the construction of this emergent political community, asking whether it would come to exist the manner needed to legitimise these newfound powers. A subset of these researchers has been particularly interested in European socialisation, a field that studies how time spent working in European institutions leads to effective cooperation and the creation of a common, imagined collective. Reviewing literature dating back to the 1970s, this dissertation finds consistent results showing that inductees’ ages and countries of origin seem to matter consistently for their likelihood of undergoing European socialisation; however, few other results appear consistently and across studies. The theoretical contribution of this work is to argue that beliefs, rather than demographics should be studied. By looking at how novel organisational roles and norms cohere to those learned over time in national communities, the socialisation process can be better understood. Setting the study at the Lesvos migration hotspot, this study uses ethnographic research methods to understand the microprocesses of the socialisation process among Seconded National Experts (SNEs) deployed by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and the European Border and Coast Guard (Frontex) in support of Greek authorities. On the basis of intensive fieldwork, including formal interviews with 24 SNEs and participant observations, this research finds that beliefs regarding legitimate authority and what constitutes high-quality work, formed during their tenures in national professional communities, help explain the efficaciousness of the socialisation process on Lesvos. Moreover, the work finds that the European professional community built on the Greek island undergirds the formation of an inchoate political one. These results contribute to those early questions asked by scholars of European integration and contain practical lessons for mangers and trainers overseeing diverse European workforces, as well as for policymakers and civil society looking to instil best practices.
05/2018
This dissertation is on general principles of growth, comprising of three chapters and a short introduction. Chapter 1 analyses the macroeconomic adjustment experienced in IMF/EU-programme countries during the Eurozone crisis by creating counterfactuals based on comparable historical or contemporaneous episodes worldwide. It therefore shows
how crisis management and the institutional framework in which it operates have important implications for the depth of the recession. In particular, an incomplete Eurozone institutional setup contributed to aggravate the crisis through higher uncertainty. The first general principle that can be drawn is that sustained growth rests not only in preventing booms but also in designing institutions that well-manage busts. When growth slows down, calls for deep structural reforms multiply. However, estimations of the short- and medium-term impact of these reforms on GDP growth remain methodologically problematic and still highly controversial. As such, Chapter 2 estimates the impact of 23 wide-reaching
structural reform packages (including both real and financial sector measures) rolled out in 22 countries between 1961 and 2000. It therefore illustrates how large reform packages tend to have on average a positive medium-term impact on growth, but these effects were highly heterogeneous across countries. The second general principle that can be drawn is
that deep economic reforms are no growth silver bullet per se, and rather require careful design, tailored to local conditions.
Finally, Chapter 3 explores factors behind the largest growth acceleration episodes that took place worldwide between 1962 and 2002 and identifies general principles that should underlie a successful growth strategy. In particular, it shows how accelerationstend to be preceded by a deep recession and major economic policy changes. Once this information
is combined with a set of counterfactual analyses, it finds that acceleration strategies should not contain off-the-shelf approaches or necessarily all-encompassing ‘shock therapy’solutions. Despite standard growth determinants doing a fairly
good job at characterising successful accelerations, the quest for take-offs remains elusive, as they seemextremely hard to engineer with a high degree of certainty.
03/2024
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.
10/2021
One central manifestation of the digital transformation that has caused profound structural changes to all parts of economic and social life are platform companies. The dissemination of platforms is associated with the restructuring of entire markets, the reorganisation of companies and the restructuring of employment relationships. This dissertation asks to what extent platform companies as a new organisational form and their impact on employment represent a disruption or a continuation of liberalization trends that have been in place for a longer time. Two arguments are advanced in this context. First, it is argued that platform companies are worth to be discussed as a distinct topic, as they differ in important regards from previous organisational forms and have profound effects on the political economy of industrialized countries. Platform companies occupy a central position in the economy and control large parts of the critical infrastructure of the internet. Although platform companies share some similarities with previous firm models such as the vertically integrated firm and the nexus of contracts model, they depart in other regards. In particular, network effects and the control of information converted into data points are key features that give them unprecedented power. Second, the effect of platform companies on employment is moderated by institutions. However, not all institutions are equally important. Whereas the employment contract, for instance, has proven to be a very resilient institution preventing the dissemination of independent contractors as preferred employment model of platform companies, the influence of unions has been limited. Moreover, the largest effect of platform companies on employment may be more of an indirect than a direct nature. Platform companies had only limited success in disseminating their preferred employment model of independent contracting, but rather reinforced existing subcontracting trends. All chapters in this dissertation contribute to these arguments from different perspectives. Moving from a macro-perspective to a micro-perspective, Chapter Two represents a review chapter on key features of platforms and their impact on the political economy of industrialized countries. Chapter Three analyses mechanisms that explain responses in ten major European countries to regulate platform work. Finally, Chapter Four represents a case study on the effect of Amazon logistics on employment in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.
01/2020
Organizations are under constant pressure from changing institutions (such as laws, public opinion, or societal norms) to react and perform in certain ways. However, these external institutional demands can sometimes run contrary to the organization’s declared value system. Between 1949 and 2016, successive changes in Germany’s social sector transformed the institutional external environment for German welfare associations, calling into question the legitimacy of their dominance in civil society in general and especially in the context of welfare provision. This comparative case study traces the development of the respective value systems of two of the main German welfare associations during that period. The two cases – Deutscher Caritas-verband (Caritas) and Deutscher Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband Gesamtverband (the Paritätischer) – were selected for their contrasting value systems within the spectrum of German welfare associations.
For the purposes of this study, value systems are understood as consistent imprinted perceptual frameworks that normatively shape and influence behavior, and external institutional demands are defined as implicit or explicit requests made from outside an organization towards the organizations by integrated systems of formal and informal rules and patterns, which structure social interactions and constitute the social environment an organization operates in. The analysis explores how such seemingly persistent value systems change over time, and how the demands made by external institutions increase or diminish explicit reference to that value system.
Drawing on the membership magazines and newspapers (or “corpus”) of the two selected associations, the analysis indicates that the value system of Catholicism initially shielded Caritas from external institutional demands until the observed level of Catholic and religious language diminished and the organization became more ex-posed to episodic change within the sector. In contrast, pluralism enabled the Paritätischer to engage more readily with the four episodes of self-help, German reunification, privatization, and social innovation, from the beginning of the study period.
In tracing how the two associations engaged with these episodes, the findings con-firm that the language associated with an organization’s imprinted value system changes over time. Here, two distinct types of imprinted value system – resisting and diaphanous – respectively shielded or enabled engagement with external institutional demands, and a framework is proposed to model the consequences of these differences.
11/2022
This dissertation examines recent contestation surrounding the status of emerging economies in international trade politics. In particular, it looks at the ways in which the rise of Brazil, India and China – the BICs – has shaped special rights for developing countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The primary focus of the thesis is the WTO’s principle of Special and Differential Treatment (SDT), which provides developing countries with exemptions from certain liberalization commitments, implementation flexibilities, and pledges of technical assistance. At the WTO, access to such special rights is based on individual members’ selfdeclaration as developing countries. However, as the BICs have risen, the ‘North’- ‘South’ binary that underpins SDT has become less clear. The continued use of a legal norm based on the strict bifurcation of WTO members into sets of developed and developing countries has thus been called into question, most notably by the United States.
At the outset, the dissertation develops a conceptual framework for delineating the different ideal typical pathways along which special and differential treatment can develop. An overall process of fragmentation is then outlined, characterized by the unmaking of special rights for developing countries, in parallel to the resilience of differential treatment for the smaller sub-group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The thesis continues by examining the contestation at the heart of these processes more closely. In doing so, it sets up a novel theoretical framework to analyse the potential adaptation strategies that emerging economies can adopt in response to contestation of their special rights. Significant strategic variation amongst the BICs comes to the fore in a series of case studies, as well as two chapters on China’s strong defence of its developing country status and Brazil’s recalibration of its (previously held) Southern leadership role. The thesis closes with an in-depth case study of negotiations on intellectual property rights. While the divergence of emerging economy positions and the fragmentation of SDT have marked the WTO era, the final chapter shows that in areas where BICs unity is still possible – such as on LDC rights – normative erosion is slowed.