Search

We study whether female students benefit from being taught by female professors, and whether such gender match effects differ by class size. We use administrative records of a German public university, covering all programs and courses between 2006 and 2018. We find that gender match effects on student performance are sizable in smaller classes, but do not exist in larger classes. This difference suggests that direct and frequent interactions between students and professors are important for the emergence of gender match effects. Instead, the mere fact that one’s professor is female is not sufficient to increase performance of female students. published

How do trade networks persist following disruptions of political networks? We study different types of persistence following the decline of the Hanseatic League using a panel of 21,590 city-level trade flows over 190 years, covering 1,425 cities. We use the Sound Toll data, a dataset collected by the Danish crown until 1857 that registered every ship entering or leaving the Baltic Sea, forming one of the most granular and extensive trade data sets. We measure trade flows by counting the number of ships sailing on a particular route in a given year and estimate gravity equations using PPML and an appropriate set of fixed effects. Bilateral gravity estimation results show that trade among former Hansa cities only shows persistence after its dissolution in 1669 for about 30 years, but this persistence is not robust across different regression specifications. However, when we incorporate the flag under which a ship is sailing and consider trilateral trade (where an observation is a combination of origin, destination, and flag), we find that trade persistently exceeds the gravity benchmark: Hansa cities continued to trade more with each other, but only on ships that were owned in another former Hansa city and thus sailed under a Hansa flag. Similar effects are found for trade among former Hansa cities and their trading posts abroad, yet again only conditional on the ship sailing under a former Hanseatic flag. Trade flows among the same pair of origin and destination cities, but under a different flag, do not show this persistence. Our main result shows that the identity of traders persists longer and more strongly than other forms of trading relationships we can measure. Apart from these new quantitative and qualitative insights on the persistence of trade flows, our paper is also of historic interest, as it provides new and detailed information on the speed of decline of trade amongst members of the Hanseatic League.

This paper documents the persistence of the Southern slave owning elite in political power after the end of the American Civil War. We draw on a database of Texan state legislators between 1860 and 1900 and link them to their or their ancestors’ slaveholdings in 1860. We then show that former slave owners made up more than half of nearly each legislature’s members until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave owning backgrounds differ systematically from those without, being more likely to represent the Democratic party and more likely to work in an agricultural occupation. Regional characteristics matter for this persistence, as counties with higher soil suitability for growing cotton on average elect more former slave owners.

We study the causal connection between trade and development using one of the earliest massive trade expansions: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the Phoenicians. We construct a measure of connectedness along the shores of the sea. This connectivity varies with the shape of the coast, the location of islands, and the distance to the opposing shore. We relate connectedness to local growth, which we measure using the presence of archaeological sites in an area. We find an association between better connected locations and archaeological sites during the Iron Age, at a time when sailors began to cross open water very routinely and on a big scale. We corroborate these findings at the level of the world.

TRA 2018, 7th Transport Research Arena, Vienne, AUTRICHE, 16-/04/2018 - 19/04/2018; In the context of the Franco-German research project Re(h)strain, this work focuses on a global system analysis integrating both safety and security analysis of international and/or urban railway stations. The Re(h)strain project focuses on terrorist attacks on high speed train systems and investigates prevention and mitigation measures to reduce the overall vulnerability and strengthen the system resilience. One main criterion regarding public transport issues is the number of passengers. For example, the railway station of Paris 'Gare du Nord' deals with a bigger number of passengers than the biggest airport in the world (SNCF open Data 2014), the Atlanta airport, but in terms of passengers, it is only around the 23rd rank railway station in the world. Due to the enormous mass of people, this leads to the system approach of breaking out the station into several classes of zones, e.g. entrance, main hall, quays, trains, etc. All classes are analysed considering state-of-the-art parameters, like targets attractiveness, feasibility of attack, possible damage, possible mitigation and defences. Then, safety incidence of security defence is discussed in order to refine security requirement with regard to the considered zone. Finally, global requirements of security defence correlated to the corresponding class of zones are proposed. A case study based on the works in Re(h)strain is used as an illustration to demonstrate how the above-mentioned security and safety requirements may be implemented and handled at train stations. Therefore, the different security measures proposed for an unaffected flow of passengers are correlated to existing ones, such as video surveillance and security personal patrolling. The results of sensor set-ups realised within the project and tested in real environment show new ways of implementing innovative techniques to security applications. Depending on the technology, sensor portals at the entrances of train stations or sensor nodes distributed throughout the station increase the level of protection achievable for the detection of threats as part of preventive security concepts. The fusion of data gained by different sensor systems, including person-tracking by non-visual object recognition and trailing, enables a core function of a security assistance system. This assistance system makes security personnel aware of threats and the location of possible carriers of suspicious material as a prior condition to successful intervention measures. The high level of automation reduces human intervention to a minimum. In the conclusion it will be recommended to think of international railway stations as complex interconnected systems which are made for sharing traffic flows. It means that thinking about local solutions may produce safety problems to connected zones due to possible overcrowding.

This paper studies the effect of oil wealth on the provision of education in the early 20th century United States. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields, I find that oil wealth increased local revenue and education spending. The quality of white teachers increased, and oil-rich counties were more likely to participate in the Rosenwald school building program for blacks. In addition, student-teacher ratios for black school children declined substantially. However, I do not find increased school enrollment rates for either race.

We study whether male-biased demand shocks affect women's labor force participation (LFP), using major oil field discoveries in the US South between 1900 and 1940. We find that oil wealth has a zero net effect on female LFP due to two opposing channels. Increased male wages lead to a higher marriage rate of young women, which could have depressed female LFP. But at the same time, oil wealth also increases demand for female labor in services, which counterbalances the marriage effect.

This paper analyses whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after their rise to power in 1933. Using data on public employment in the armed forces, public administrations and related professions from the German occupational censuses in 1925, 1933 and 1939 and addressing the potential endogeneity of the National Socialist vote share in 1933 by way of an instrumental variables strategy based on a similar party in Imperial Germany 1912, I find that cities with higher National Socialist vote shares experienced a relative increase in public employment: for every additional percentage point in the vote share, the number of public employment jobs increased by around 3.5 percent. When measured relative to the total population, a one standard-deviation increase in the 1933 vote share led to an increase in the share of public employment of a quarter of a standard deviation.

This paper analyzes the effect of resource-based economic specialization on women's labor market outcomes. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields in the Southern United States coupled with a county-level panel derived from US Census data for 1900-1940, we specifically test the hypothesis that the presence of mineral resources can induce changes in the sectoral composition of the local economy that are detrimental to women's labor market outcomes. We find evidence that the discovery of oil at the county level may constitute a substantial male biased demand shock to local labor markets, as it is associated with a higher gender pay gap. However, we find no evidence that oil wealth lowers female labor force participation or has any impact on local marriage and fertility patterns. While our results are consistent with oil shocks limiting female labor market opportunities in some sectors (mainly manufacturing), this effect tends to be compensated by the higher availability of service sector jobs for women who are therefore not driven out of the labor market.

Mit der Verbreitung des Internets hat ein Trend Einzug gehalten, der spätestens mit der welt-weiten COVID-19 Pandemie einen sprunghaften Anstieg verzeichnen konnte. Homeoffice oder das Arbeiten außerhalb der Unternehmensräumlichkeiten hat sich in den Bereichen der Wissensarbeit etabliert und bietet neben Vorteilen auch Nachteile, sowohl für den Arbeitneh-mer als auch den Arbeitgeber. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden die technologischen Voraus-setzungen für virtuelles Arbeiten erörtert. Ebenso sollen die Anforderungen an die Arbeitneh-mer sowie die Auswirkungen auf die Zusammenarbeit virtueller Teams und die Herausforde-rungen aus Sicht der Arbeitnehmer erarbeitet werden.Mit Hilfe der Szenariotechnik sollen anschließend mögliche Szenarien für die Zukunft der Ar-beitswelt erarbeitet, sowie deren Einflussfaktoren aufgezeigt werden. Damit soll ein Ausblick auf mögliche zukünftige Chancen sowie Herausforderungen gegeben werden und die Ergeb-nisse daraus können als Empfehlung für zukünftige Arbeitsmodelle in Unternehmen dienen., Stephan Maurer, Masterarbeit Universität Klagenfurt, Universitätslehrgang Business Manager/in 2023, in englische Sprache

In the context of the Franco-German research project Re(h)strain, this work focuses on a global system analysis integrating both safety and security analysis of international and/or urban railway stations. The Re(h)strain project focuses on terrorist attacks on high speed train systems and investigates prevention and mitigation measures to reduce the overall vulnerability and strengthen the system resilience. One main criterion regarding public transport issues is the number of passengers. For example, the railway station of Paris “Gare du Nord” deals with a bigger number of passengers than the biggest airport in the world (SNCF open Data 2014), the Atlanta airport, but in terms of passengers, it is only around the 23rd rank railway station in the world. Due to the enormous mass of people, this leads to the system approach of breaking out the station into several classes of zones, e.g. entrance, main hall, quays, trains, etc. All classes are analysed considering state-of-the-art parameters, like targets attractiveness, feasibility of attack, possible damage, possible mitigation and defences. Then, safety incidence of security defence is discussed in order to refine security requirement with regard to the considered zone. Finally, global requirements of security defence correlated to the corresponding class of zones are proposed. A case study based on the works in Re(h)strain is used as an illustration to demonstrate how the above-mentioned security and safety requirements may be implemented and handled at train stations. Therefore, the different security measures proposed for an unaffected flow of passengers are correlated to existing ones, such as video surveillance and security personal patrolling. The results of sensor set-ups realised within the project and tested in real environment show new ways of implementing innovative techniques to security applications. Depending on the technology, sensor portals at the entrances of train stations or sensor nodes distributed throughout the station increase the level of protection achievable for the detection of threats as part of preventive security concepts. The fusion of data gained by different sensor systems, including person-tracking by non-visual object recognition and trailing, enables a core function of a security assistance system. This assistance system makes security personnel aware of threats and the location of possible carriers of suspicious material as a prior condition to successful intervention measures. The high level of automation reduces human intervention to a minimum. In the conclusion it will be recommended to think of international railway stations as complex interconnected systems which are made for sharing traffic flows. It means that thinking about local solutions may produce safety problems to connected zones due to possible overcrowding.