Research Seminar & RTG Day
Summer 2026
The research seminar, which regularly hosts external researchers, is open to the public. It is part of the RTG Day and will be held in LF 224 on the Duisburg Campus of the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) every Tuesday from 16:15 to 17:30 during the summer semester of 2026.
The easiest way to reach Duisburg Campus is by Bus #933, #926 or #920 from Duisburg Central Train Station. Please take the East Exit (Osteingang) as you leave the Central Station. You will see the bus stop for #933 and #926 when you walk about 50 meters and hit the Neudorfer Straße. You need to get off the bus at the stop “Duisburg Universität”.
21 April 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Christoph E. Boehm (University of Texas, Austin)
How Responsive are Durables Expenditures to Transitory Income Shocks? (with Changseok Ma)
We estimate how expenditures on durable goods respond to transitory income shocks using variation from the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. The estimated responses are large: Households spent about 80 percent of their stimulus payment within three months of receiving the income transfer on durables alone. Most of this spending was on motor vehicles, either financed, used, or both, and about 20 percent of the total expenditure response was on smaller items. To finance motor vehicle purchases the average household levered up by 40 cents on the dollar using vehicle loans. Our findings suggest that durable goods and their financing are key to understanding the link between current income and spending.
28 April 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Andreas Link (FAU - University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.)
The Historical Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy: The Persistent Effect of the Naturopathic Movement in Germany
This paper examines the historical roots of vaccine hesitancy in Germany. Drawing on digitized from the year 1900 on the strength of the naturopathic movement — the largest movement critical of medicine, including vaccinations, at that time — we show that counties with a higher number of such associations in 1900 have significantly lower vaccination rates today. In terms of underlying mechanisms, we show that the movement changed the way health care is provided and we present evidence indicating that it affected the intergenerational transmission of norms.
19 May 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Matthias Westphal (Hagen University)
Public Transportation Investments and the Rise of the Labor Movement
This paper studies how railroad expansion reshaped the political economy of nineteenth-century Germany and contributed to the rise of the labor movement. By lowering transport costs, railroads facilitated labor mobility and information diffusion, but also shifted the balance of economic and political power between workers and local elites. We ask whether improved market integration and migration opportunities translated into greater political mobilization.
To identify the causal effects of rail access, we assemble a new data set on railroad station openings and combine complementary identification strategies, including two-way fixed effects, a straight-line instrument based on predicted network routes, and simulated railroad access. Using historical data for the German Empire from 1871 to 1912, we show that constituencies gaining rail access experience higher Socialist (SPD) vote shares, higher voter turnout, and faster population growth.
We further investigate the mechanisms linking infrastructure expansion to political change. First, we examine legislative behavior using roll-call votes on Socialist policies. Second, we study the diffusion of socialist ideas through the spread of Socialist newspapers to distinguish ideological transmission from worker reallocation. Consistent with these channels, the political effects of rail access are strongest in constituencies with prior unionization, a history of strikes, and higher levels of industrialization. Overall, the results suggest that transportation infrastructure not only transformed economic activity but also helped mobilize workers politically by strengthening labor-market integration and the spread of political ideas.
16 June 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Adrian Lerche (IAB)
Espionage-Based Knowledge Flows and Firm Outcomes
(with Albrecht Glitz and Lukas Mergele)
Economic espionage is a pervasive global phenomenon. We study how this activity affects the performance and production structure of firms in the perpetrating country. Exploiting historical data from East Germany that trace the flow of scientific-technical information from their sources in the West to their recipients in East Germany, we show that economic espionage increased firms’ output, productivity and exports. Our results further suggest that the technical change induced by economic espionage was factor-neutral, and that the associated productivity gains propagated through the production network via input-output linkages. In the long run, a higher inflow of espionage information was associated with a higher likelihood of successful privatization following German reunification.
23 June 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Guyonne Kalb (University of Melbourne)
The effect of separation on poverty and employment
Using 2001–2021 HILDA survey data, this paper estimates how separation or divorce affects poverty and employment trajectories over five years after the event. A difference-in-differences approach compares separated individuals with couples who stayed together, accounting for recent and long-term labour market history prior to separation. Women with preschool children face a 19.9 percentage point higher poverty risk in the first year, which fades within three years. Women with older or no children experience smaller but longer-lasting poverty increases. Pre-separation employment strongly moderates effects: non-employed women face much higher poverty risks than employed women who have similar poverty risks to men. Men’s poverty impacts are smaller and shorter-lived. Separation barely changes women’s employment but slightly reduces men’s employment, especially those with preschool children.
30 June 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Florian Mayneris (UQAM)
The evolution of the co-location of jobs and residents within U.S. cities
(with K. Behrens, J. Martin and F. Toubal)
We study the co-location of jobs and residents within U.S. cities and its evolution between 1990 and 2020. For 285 out of 381 CBSAs and almost all large MSAs, jobs and residents have become more co-localized. This trend is associated with a decrease in the size of establishments and a homogenization in the average size of establishments across locations within cities. We develop and estimate a quantitative urban model for Chicago %in 1990 and 2020 to interpret these facts. A structural accounting exercise shows that the increasing co-location of jobs and residents has been driven by changes in productive and residential amenities. The dispersion in the comparative advantage of locations for production relative to residence has shrunk over time, reflecting a leveling of the playing field for production within the city, and thereby increasing the prevalence of mixed-use locations.
7 July 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Sebastian Ottinger (CERGE-EI: Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute)
Path Dependence in Economic Geography: Theory and Evidence from Post Roads (with Gianandrea Lanzara, Matteo Santacesaria, and Elizaveta Zelnitskaia)
Do history or geography determine the location and size of cities? We offer a novel perspective on this question to reconcile conflicting views in the theoretical and empirical literature. First, we develop a spatial model of urban systems and provide a novel characterization of its equilibrium in a general geographic setting. In the model, agents with identical preferences choose where to live and work, generating an endogenous commuting partition and allowing economic activity to concentrate in a subset of locations. We show that increasing returns can produce multiple equilibria in city locations, even when the city-size distribution remains unique. Then, we propose a new identification strategy to test for path dependence in urban location. Our empirical setting is the yams system of the former Russian Empire, where post stations were placed at regular horse-changing intervals across sparsely populated areas for logistical rather than economic reasons. Combining newly digitized data from the 1777 Roadbook with modern satellite night-light data, we find that locations within the historical stopping range are significantly brighter today than nearby locations along the same routes. This persistence of quasi-random city seeds into stable modern settlements provides direct empirical validation for the multiple spatial equilibria generated by our framework. In ongoing work, we use this setting to test the model’s secondary prediction: whether fixing city locations uniquely determines their relative sizes.
14 July 2026
Room: LF 224
Duisburg Campus
Udo Kreickemeier (University of Göttingen)
Tax Progressivity and the Distributional Effects of Globalisation
(with Hartmut Egger and Miriam Kohl)
Is it a good idea for governments to have a progressive tax system in order to redistribute the gains from globalization between individuals? And if so, how progressive should the tax system be? In this paper, we give answers to these questions using a standard, firm-based general equilibrium model of international trade in which the heterogeneity of market incomes is the result of exogenously heterogenous managerial ability in the population. We introduce into this framework a tax-transfer system in which the progressivity of the tax schedule is governed by a constant marginal tax rate and an income threshold above which the constant marginal tax rate is applied, leading to average tax rates that are increasing in individual income. Opening up to international trade disproportionately benefits the highest-ability managers, and we show that progressivity of the tax schedule matters crucially for the ability of the tax-transfer system to produce equitable results of globalization.