Sandra Schaffner

I. In the literature on segregation, it has been shown by many studies that undesirable neighbourhood effects may emerge in deprived areas (Behrens, Pokrovsky, and Zhelobodko 2018; Kuminoff, Smith,...

Household well-being is strongly influenced by changes in income – but real income is strongly determined by housing costs. The evolution of inequalities in both variables largely determines the development of living conditions between households. In this paper, we look at inequality trends between 2008 and 2017 from a regional perspective – between and within regions. While neighborhood earnings inequality has generally declined slightly, it is rising within Germany’s largest cities. On the other hand, inequality in rents has less declined within those cities than in the rest of Germany, corresponding to price increases in poorer neighborhoods, too. Households in these poor neighborhoods thus suffer from a below-average earnings development, while it seems that the main costs caused by new rentals increase similar to the rest of the city.

Vaccination is a highly effective method to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate severe disease. In Germany, adult vaccination rates are relatively high at 85.5%, but rates are significantly lower for adolescents (69.6%) and children (20.0%). This discrepancy indicates that not all vaccinated parents choose to vaccinate their children. Analyzing data from a January 2022 online survey of 1,819 parents with children and adolescents, we explore the socio-economic factors influencing parents’ willingness to vaccinate themselves and their children. Our results show that individuals who vote for either side of the political extremes are less likely to vaccinate their children. This pattern is particularly strong for voters on the far right. In addition, we find that better educated parents are more likely to vaccinate both themselves and their children. Parents who vaccinate both themselves and their children demonstrate greater confidence in the vaccine’s effectiveness, while those who vaccinate only themselves are often motivated by a desire to regain personal freedoms. These insights highlight the need for targeted public health strategies to address specific concerns and improve vaccination rates among children and adolescents.

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, many measures were taken during the pandemic. These measures also affected pupils, like the multiple school closures. Children from different backgrounds are likely to have different abilities to cope with the challenges of the pandemic and associated countermeasures. We investigate whether the already existing differences between schools in high and low income neighborhoods increased even further. Our results show that the transition rate from primary schools to the academic track decreased by 1.3 percentage points more in low income neighborhoods relative to high income neighborhoods, suggesting that the pandemic has increased educational inequality in Germany

Berlin‐Brandenburg airport (BER) became well‐known far beyond German borders due to substantial planning problems and multiple opening delays. Originally planned to open in March 2012, BER finally opened in 2020, after seven delay announcements. Focusing on the two most surprising and meaningful announcements, these unexpected delays form an exogeneous shock for residents surrounding the largest existing airport, Berlin‐Tegel, which was expected to close immediately upon opening of BER. We use these delay announcements as a quasi‐experiment to analyze separately the effects on apartment rental prices of aircraft noise (due to arriving/departing flight paths) and airport proximity (accessibility). The results suggest there is a negative effect of aircraft noise on rental prices of 2%–5%, while there are positive proximity effects from Berlin‐Tegel of 1%–3%. We consider heterogeneity using quantile regression and find the negative noise effects are larger for higher priced apartments. We disentangle aircraft noise and other (environmental) noise effects, and herein find that aircraft noise lowers property values by 2%–2.8%, while properties facing additional environmental noise experience a separate 1.7% decrease. In a joint model of noise and proximity, we observe the proximity benefits and the noise externalities essentially cancel each other out.

The development and conditions of the housing market are an important part of economic research, receiving growing attention also in Germany. The RWI-GEO-RED dataset covers data for the German residential housing market from 2007 onwards on 1 km² level and closes the gap for small-scale, nationwide and up-to-date housing data for Germany. The data has a large potential in analyzing the real estate market itself or to evaluate policy interventions through treatments on small regional levels. Prominent examples are the closing of nuclear power plants and the German rent control. The dataset can be used on its own but also has a large potential for combination with different data. The dataset is provided by the FDZ Ruhr at RWI that hosts small-scale regional data for Germany. The data can be obtained for scientific research as scientific use file.

Article Regional Real Estate Price Indices for Germany, 2008 – 2019: RWI–GEO–REDX was published on February 1, 2021 in the journal Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik (volume 241, issue 1).

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is a rotational panel provided by Eurostat that covers variables with a high potential for comparative European labor market and social research. Unfortunately, its current availability limits its potential research applications. This research note describes these shortcomings of the current data provision. Furthermore, we make two contributions for a better exploitation of these data sets: First, we develop a method for combining the different waves in order to increase the number of usable observations; and second, we indicate how monthly data on income and hourly pay can be derived.