🎓 Stellenausschreibung: Wissenschaftl Mitarbeiter/in an meinem Lehrstuhl für Public Economics an der Universität Passau
Ich habe ab 1.10.26 eine Doktorandenstelle (75%, TVL E13, 3 Jahre mit Option auf Verlängerung) zu besetzen.
Details: tinyurl.com/mucj8hde
Vielen Dank fürs Teilen & Weiterleiten!
📄 Read an ungated version of the full research paper here: www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo...
📄 Read a non-technical German summary here: www.ifo.de/DocDL/sd-202...
📄 Read a non-technical short summary (in German and English) here: www.digital.uni-passau.de/en/beitraege...
🌍 Why does this matter?
Findings suggest that abolishing birthright citizenship could have unintended consequences, including higher youth crime & its associated costs. Inclusive birthright citizenship policies, by contrast, can foster social integration of children with long-run beneficial effects.
Moreover, citizenship fosters cooperation betw immigrant children & their native peers. Finally, parents of children receiving citizenship start to engage more with the local community and use the German language. Birthright citizenship promotes social integration, which reduces criminal engagement.
🔍 How does citizenship reduce crime?
Prior research points to several mechanisms: Birthright citizenship raises educational attainment and expands labor market opportunities, which increases the opportunity costs of criminal behavior.
📊 What did we find?
Using newly collected administrative data on police-reported crimes from three German federal states (Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, and Berlin), covering 120,000+ individual criminal cases with youth suspects, we find that birthright citizenship reduced youth crime by 70%.
This gives rise to a natural experiment that allows us to estimate causal effects instead of just correlations: children of immigrant parents born just after January 1, 2000 were far more likely to receive citizenship at birth than those born just before.
📌 What did we study?
From 2000, granted automatic citizenship at birth (jus soli) to children of immigrants who had legally resided in Germany for at least 8 years. Prior to 2000, children born on German territory received birthright citizenship only if at least one parent held the German passport.
More than a quarter of people aged 15–34 in OECD countries are foreign-born or have foreign-born parents. How we integrate them and their children has profound consequences for society. One underexplored policy lever is access to birthright citizenship.
In our new research paper (joint work with Leander Andres, Gordon B. Dahl, Helmut Rainer, and Simone Schueller), we show that birthright citizenship substantially declines youth crime of children born to migrant families. Here are more details of the study design, data, results, and mechanisms:
Prof. Dr. Stefan Bauernschuster, Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Public Economics.
Die Grafik zeigt den Effekt der Staatsbürgerschaft durch Geburt auf Jugendkriminalität. Verglichen wurden Jugendliche, die kurz vor und nach der Reform im Jahr 2000 geboren wurden. Die gestrichelte Linie zeigt ein fiktives Szenario ohne Kriminalitätsrückgang. Der tatsächliche Rückgang entspricht der Differenz zwischen der gestrichelten grauen und der durchgezogenen grauen Linie.
Eine neue Studie zeigt: Die #Staatsbürgerschaft durch Geburt reduziert #Kriminalität von Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund erheblich. Beteiligt an der Forschung war der Ökonom @sbauernschuster.bsky.social von unserer Uni.
Mehr dazu 👉 www.digital.uni-passau.de/beitraege/20...
#EconSky 🧪
📆 Join us on March 11 at our economics research seminar with Stefan Bauernschuster (@sbauernschuster.bsky.social), who will present "Birthright Citizenship and Youth Crime."
Details and abstract:
www.jku.at/news-events/...
🚨 Thrilled that our 🆕 paper
“Age and Cognitive Skills: Use It or Lose It”
just came out in #ScienceAdvances @science.org
💡 Longitudinal evidence: age pattern of literacy+numeracy not as bleak as cross-section suggests + strongly differs by skill usage
www.science.org/doi/full/10....
🧵A thread
1/7
Mechanisms II: Why was SPD believed to have expertise in public health? In contrast to other parties, SPD and its predecessors explicitly addressed health policy in party programs; SPD particularly concerned with health of workers; SPD strongly involved in health insurance system
Mechanisms I: Not driven by populist and extremist parties; no evidence for punishing/rewarding incumbents; no by-product of dismal economic conditions after World War I. Results in line with issue ownership theory: voters reward competence in salient issues.
Validity & robustness checks: Parallel pre-trends ✅; city-level analysis: effect driven by deaths due to respiratory diseases ✅; robust to controlling for large set of covariates, incl., e.g., pre-War poverty, inequality, other mortality phenomena during World War I.✅
Effect size: Moving from a constituency at the 25th percentile of mortality to a constituency at the 75th percentile of the mortality distribution increased the left-wing vote share by 2.1 percentage points or 12.4 percent of a standard deviation. Effect is persistent.
Method and data: We exploit a panel of voting results containing 14 elections from 1893 to 1933 across all 362 constituencies of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic in a difference-in-differences design and combine this panel with a measure of Spanish flu mortality in 1918.
Background II: Still, since the pandemic killed around 400,000 people and public life was altered due to widespread sick leaves, the Spanish Flu was arguably salient to voters when elections were held in January 1919, just a month after the 2nd wave had flattened.
Background I: The deadly 2nd wave of the Spanish flu hit Germany in late 1918 during the crucial phase of World War I. As authorities did not want to raise concerns of the people, they rejected any interventions and did little to limit the spread of influenza
Take-home result: Excess mortality due to the Spanish Flu resulted in a lasting shift of votes towards left-wing parties in the Weimar Republic. Extremists could not benefit from pandemic. Mechanism: As public health became a salient issue, voters rewarded expertise in this issue
🚨PUBLICATION ALERT
The #SpanishFlu was one of the deadliest pandemics in history. How did it affect elections in the Weimar Republic?
w/ Matthias Blum, Christoph Koenig & @hornungerik.bsky.social @econtribute.bsky.social
Now published in Explorations in Economic History: doi.org/10.1016/j.ee...
Thank you @danielkuehnle.bsky.social for inviting me to present my paper „The impact of Margaret Sanger‘s birth control clinics on early 20th century US fertility and mortality“ @unidue.bsky.social.
Super nice crowd, great comments - highly recommend!
www.wiwi.uni-passau.de/fileadmin/do...
Dazu ein schönes Portrait im Digitalen Forschungsmagazin der Uni Passau @unipassauresearch.bsky.social von @kathaimerl.bsky.social
www.digital.uni-passau.de/beitraege/20...
Herzlichen Glückwunsch an meinen lieben Kollegen Marc Goerigk zum 1. Platz im BWL-Ranking U40 @wirtschaftswoche.bsky.social
🥳 wiwo.de/politik/konj...
German magazine @wirtschaftswoche.bsky.social has named a professor from our university as the most prolific young business economist in Germany - congratulations, Professor #MarcGoerigk 👏🙌 Learn more about his research and why he finds the abstract more beautiful than concrete problems:
It's that time of year again ❄️ icy conditions increase workplace accidents by 6.3%, especially among older workers. In this study to be published in the @jpube.bsky.social, @katharinad.bsky.social and @benjanz.bsky.social analyse the economic burden of extreme temperatures:
#econsky 🧪
Today was a rather productive day
Hier ist ein spannendes Papier, das zeigt, dass fest installierte Blitzer wirken, aber nur sehr lokal (Umkreis 500 Meter): www.dropbox.com/s/rupfe4rxqz...
