Katharina Wedel prepared this study while she was working at the Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2023 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

Equality of opportunity is a principle of justice that is built on two fundamental ideas. On the one hand, outcome differences across individuals are unacceptable if they are rooted in factors that are beyond individual control. Examples of such circumstance characteristics are the biological...

Im Jahr 2015 wurden in Deutschland über eine Million Flüchtlinge registriert. In demselben Zeitraum wurden etwa 450.000 Asylanträge gestellt, was die höchste Antragszahl seit 1992 darstellt. Von den 450.000 Anträgen sind ungefähr 50 Prozent positiv beschieden worden, sodass nicht nur viele...

Die Energiewende bürdet den Verbrauchern zunehmende Lasten auf. Relativ zu ihrem Einkommen fallen diese Belastungen für einkommensschwache Haushalte stäker aus als für einkommensstarke Haushalte. Die Ergebnisse unserer empirischen Erhebung unter mehr als 11.000 Haushalten zeigen jedoch, dass...

Die gesellschaftliche Zustimmung zu den politischen Zielen der Energiewende wird nicht unwesentlich von ihren finanziellen Verteilungswirkungen und den individuellen Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen der privaten Haushalte beeinflusst. Die empirische Untersuchung dieses Zusammenhangs bildet den Kern...

The aim of this doctoral project is an empirical analysis of questions concerning economics of education, in particular education policy. The first key aspect is the relationship between public opinion and the level of information of the population. As part of this, a first research project...

A Note on the Evolution of Inequality in Poland, 1992-99 (reprinted from Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 27, No. 5, 2003, pp. 755-768, by permission of Cambridge Political Economy Society) Income inequality in Poland, after falling over the period 1993-96, rose significantly from 1997...

The paper analyses economic inequality in Croatia in comparison with other transition economies of Central, East and Southeast Europe. It comprises a literature review and a descriptive analysis as well as an econometric modelling exercise. The main findings are the following Over the entire...

In the 2008 Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) Pretest, the factorial survey method was tested for the first time for use in the SOEP longitudinal study. In this paper, we describe the construction and application of the vignette module, which has its origins in the field of justice research and...

Income comparisons are among the key mechanisms used to explain satisfaction and happiness, among other outcomes. Yet progress on the questions of who people use as social referents and whether differential selection patterns exist can only be made based on valid and reliable measures of pay...