Accounting for the spouse when measuring inequality of opportunity

Existing literature on inequality of opportunity (IOp) has failed to address the question as to how the circumstances and choices of spouses in a couple should be treated. By omitting information relevant to the spouse in IOp estimations, the implicit assumption was full responsibility for the partner's income, effort and circumstance variables. In this paper, we discuss whether or not the partner's characteristics should be treated as responsibility factors. Using German micro data, we analyze empirically, how IOp estimates are affected when a partner's circumstance or effort variables are included as own circumstances in the analysis. Our analysis indicates that including spouse's variables can increase IOp measures by more than 20 (35) percent for gross (net) earnings. The less the responsibility assumed for the partner's variables, the higher the IOp estimate

Employing MPI Collectives for Timing Analysis on Embedded Multi-Cores

Static WCET analysis of parallel programs running on shared-memory multicores suffers from high pessimism. Instead, distributed memory platforms which communicate via messages may be one solution for manycore systems. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standard for communication on these platforms. We show how its concept of collective operations can be employed for timing analysis. The idea is that the worst-case execution time (WCET) of a parallel program may be estimated by adding the WCET estimates of sequential program parts to the WCET estimates of communication parts. Therefore, we first analyse the two MPI operations MPI_Allreduce and MPI_Sendrecv. Employing these results, we make a timing analysis of the conjugate gradient (CG) benchmark from the NAS parallel benchmark suite

Reforming the financing of the European Union : a proposal

Die Debatte zu den Reformen des EU-Haushalts und des Eigenmittelsystems hat eine lange Tradition. Es wurden bereits zahlreiche Reformvorschläge unterbreitet. Einige von ihnen beschränken sich auf geringfügige Anpassungen des bestehenden Systems, andere wiederum empfehlen tiefgreifende Veränderungen. Staatshaushalt und Besteuerung gehören zum Kern nationalstaatlicher Souveränität. Daher müssen Reformen des EU-Finanzsystems vor dem Hintergrund des besonderen Institutionengefüges der EU betrachtet werden

Four Essays on Inequality and Migration

The book ”Capital in the 21. Century” by Piketty (2014) marked the peak of attention for the topic of income inequality and spread awareness on the importance of ongoing research. During my master thesis, I had worked on decomposition methods for labor earnings. Motivated by this development in the literature and first experiences in academic research, I started working on income inequality as a topic for a Ph.D. thesis. The first project developed directly from the question how income inequality in Germany had developed over the last decade. Since 2005, we observed a growing labor market and economic recovery from the recession in the early 2000s. Given these increasing employment opportunities, we analyzed how income inequality developed. Our main finding was that income inequality did not increase further after 2005. On the one hand, within-year employment opportunities compensated otherwise rising inequality in annual labor incomes. On the other hand, income inequality did not decrease at all, because all parts of the income distribution benefited from the economic boom after 2006. The concept of equality of opportunity (EOP) is directly related to income inequality and labor market development. A natural question is the dependence of inequality in adult outcomes on family background and childhood circumstances when working on income inequality and its underlying causes. The literature on EOP divides all potential determinants of adult outcomes in two main categories, circumstances and effort. The former comprise of all factors outside the realm of personal responsibility for which society should not hold people responsible, such as parental education. The latter represents personal choices and effort independent of circumstances. Total equality of opportunity would exist if inequality in adult income depended on effort. As I was interested in income inequality in the household context as well, the second project stemmed from the question how measurement of EOP depends on the partner in a relationship. We found that taking into account the spouse in measuring EOP matters empirically and from a theoretical perspective. A prominent circumstance in the EOP literature is the country of origin. The increasing refugee migration all over Europe and Germany in particular raised the question which opportunities these newly arriving immigrants would face. Working on such timely events has benefits and disadvantages. On the one hand, one is sure to 1 work on the frontier of applied research and social debate. On the other hand, data is scarce and the consequences of events cannot fully be observed immediately. Hence, we started to work on the short-terms effect of increased refugee migration to Germany in terms of employment, crime, and voting behavior. Our analysis indicates a small effect on crime rates, mostly around reception centers and with respect to drug crimes. The results on labor market integration showed an increase in foreign job seekers. The recognition of refugee status is the necessary premise for labor market integration, but not necessarily sufficient. Extensive research has been conducted on the integration of refugees into the labor market and society. However, no consensus has been reached which factors perform best at facilitating job search and employment prospects. Many governments around de world use allocation schemes in order to pre- vent the formation of enclaves. In 2016, also the German government implemented a residency obligation for accepted refugees. The last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis is about the effectiveness of such an allocation scheme in fostering labor market integration and preventing criminal behavior of accepted refugees. Thereby, I combine insights from previous work in the final chapter. So far, I find a small but significantly positive effect of a residency obligation on employment prospects

Jobs, crime and votes : a short-run evaluation of the refugee crisis in Germany

Millions of refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Yet little is known about the impact of this inflow on labour markets, crime and voting behaviour. This paper uses administrative data on asylum seeker allocation and provides an evaluation of the short‐run consequences of the refugee inflow. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that a scramble for accommodation determined the assignment of asylum seekers to German counties, resulting in exogenous variation in the number of asylum seekers per county within and across states. Our estimates suggest that those migrants have not displaced native workers but have themselves struggled to find gainful employment. We find moderate increases in crime, and our analysis further indicates that while at the macro level increased migration was accompanied by increased support for anti‐immigrant parties, exposure to asylum seekers at the micro level had a small negative effect

Trends in the German income distribution : 2005/06 to 2010/11

We analyze the potential influence of a number of factors on the distribution of equivalized net incomes in Germany over the period 2005/2006 to 2010/11. While income inequality considerably increased in the years before 2005/2006, this trend was stopped after 2005/2006. Among many other factors, we consider the role of the employment boom and the development of inequality in wage incomes after 2005/2006. Our results suggest that, despite further increases in wage inequality, inequality in equivalized net incomes did not increase further after 2005/2006 because increased within-year employment opportunities compensated otherwise rising inequality in annual labour incomes. On the other hand, income inequality did not fall in a more marked way after 2005/2006 because also the middle and the upper part of the distribution benefitted from the employment boom. Other factors, such as changing household structures, population aging and changes in the tax and transfer system had no important effects on the distribution. Finally, we find little evidence that the distribution of equivalized net incomes was affected in any important way by the financial crisis and the subsequent great recession

Jobs, crime, and votes : a short-run evaluation of the refugee crisis in Germany

Millions of refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Yet, little is known about the impact of this inow on labor markets, crime, and voting behavior. This article uses administrative data on refugee allocation and provides an evaluation of the short-run consequences of the refugee inow. Our identification strategy exploits that a scramble for accommodation determined the assignment of refugees to German counties resulting in exogeneous variations in the number of refugees per county even within states. Our estimates suggest that migrants have not displaced native workers but have themselves struggled to find gainful employment. We find very small increases in crime in particular with respect to drug offenses and fare-dodging. Our analysis further suggests that counties which experience a larger inux see neither more nor less support for the main anti-immigrant party than counties which experience small migrant inows

A reproducible extrusion printing process with highly viscous nanoparticle inks

Printing of functional materials such as nanoparticle inks is a class of additive fabrication techniques complementary to standard subtractive electronics fabrication techniques such as pcb technology on pcb level or silicon based microelectronics on integrated circuit level. To date the majority of digital printing processes for (micro)electronics is inkjet based. Moreover aerosol jet based printing also establishes itself for printing on non-planar substrates and for materials with higher viscosities. A material deposition technique available since decades and mainly used for dispensing of adhesives and sealing materials is fluid-filament printing. It allows to cover a wide range of materials and viscosities and thus, also holds potential for additive manufacturing of electronics. In this paper we systematically study the influences on fluid filament printing both theoretically taking into account ink and equipment tolerances and experimentally using mainly standard dispensing equipment and two commercial screen printing inks. At the end of the paper we derive recommendations for reproducible printing of conductive lines and pads and give an outlook to printing 2.5D structures