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Using household-level survey data on 22 European countries collected in four waves between 2010 and 2022, we document the distributional effects of borrower-based macroprudential measures (BBM). We find that the tightening of the BBM significantly reduces the availability of mortgages for lower-income households, leading to increased reliance on renting. Regulation works not only through the extensive margin by cutting off risky borrowers from the mortgage market, but also through the intensive margin by reducing the average loan amount of households with lower incomes. This reduction in risk has the positive side effect of lower borrowing costs, benefiting mainly households with above-average incomes. The easing of BBM, observed in several countries, does not yet fully reverse these effects.

This paper examines the relationship between undocumented immigration and crime using data covering approximately 16,000 migrant hotel rooms during the New York City migrant housing crisis. I exploit the timing of migrant busing from the southern border as an exogenous source of variation in a difference-in-differences specification. I find that an additional 100 migrant shelter hotel rooms (per 100k Hispanics) are associated with 1.11 more Hispanic arrests (per 100k Hispanics) at the modified zip code-by-week level. The baseline results are driven by cash-generating offenses, such as petit and grand larceny, and depend on service-sector business license rates.

Systematic reviews show that multinationality is measured in many ways, yet these measures are often treated as equivalent. This study conducts a systematic literature review of multinationality metrics used since the 1960s and maps their operationalizations across empirical, theoretical, and review articles. Building on and extending Vaněk’s (2024) framework, the metrics are classified by construct, dimension, indicators, segmentation, and format, revealing substantial conceptual and structural differences behind similar-looking measures. Selected metrics are then empirically compared using Taiwanese firm data to show how they lead to conflicting assessments of internationalization. The study explains why multinationality is difficult to measure consistently and offers a structured basis for selecting and interpreting metrics in future research.

TBA

Accurate perception of social relationships is central to human social cognition, yet little is known about how well individuals perceive incoming social ties within their natural social environments. We collected data from 3,077 adolescents across 117 classrooms and analyzed complete social networks comprising four directed relational layers—friends, best friends, enemies, and worst enemies—alongside adolescents’ predictions of who would nominate them in each layer. Across all layers, perceptual accuracy was strikingly low. Only 0.29% of students assessed all of their relationships correctly. Errors were overwhelmingly driven by underestimation: adolescents systematically failed to recognize how many peers named them, both positively and negatively. Misperception was structured rather than random. Popularity (in-degree) was strongly associated with underestimation, whereas sociability (out-degree) was associated with overestimation. These structural patterns were consistent across relational layers and error types and showed no systematic improvement with age. Together, these findings reveal robust structural asymmetries in social cognition, suggesting that young people perceive far less of their social worlds than there is.

Inaccurate inference about economic policy uncertainty affects international investment returns, and investment decisions made with imperfect information result in financial losses for all market participants. The classic widely used Baker et al. (2016) index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) suffers from methodological imperfections in construction due to (1) neglecting semantics, (2) data quality fluctuations, and (3) ignoring tonality/emotion in the data. In this paper, we introduce a novel emotion-based economic policy uncertainty index that (i) improves the semantic identification of economic policy by extracting a large set of tokens from RoBERTa, (ii) uses a vast CC-News media dataset, and (iii) identifies uncertainty by a finetuned emotion recognition model.

We study the effect of working from home (WFH) on health-related absenteeism. We draw on a monthly panel (2018–2023) of nearly 1.9 million workers insured under a major German statutory health insurance fund. Our identification strategy leverages the differential exposure to the unexpected shift to WFH in 2020, resulting in about one-quarter of German employees regularly working remotely today. Specifically, our difference-in-differences design compares sick leave take-up across workers with different WFH potential, i.e., the teleworkability of their occupation in February 2020. Our results imply a nontrivial lasting response to WFH. Compared to the pre-treatment mean, the monthly likelihood of sick leave take-up declined by 3.3% by 2023 due to a 10-percentage-point increase in WFH potential (comparable to a shift from performing and entertainment professions to media documentation and information services). These effects are driven by reductions in respiratory infections and musculoskeletal disorders, such as back pain. The response reflects not only behavioral changes in sick leave take-up, but also genuine health improvements.

Germany was the first country worldwide to introduce a structured reimbursement pathway for digital therapeutics (DiGA), effectively allowing physicians to prescribe smartphone apps covered by statutory health insurance. In this seminar, Simon Reif presents recent research evaluating whether this pioneering regulation successfully incentivized innovation in the digital health market.  Using high-frequency data from the Apple App Store and synthetic control methods, the study analyzes the market entry of health apps following the policy's introduction. The findings reveal a significant increase in the number of German-language digital therapeutics; however, this quantity did not translate into a broader diversity of medical conditions treated. Furthermore, the surge was largely driven by apps that monetize patient data for advertising rather than high-quality applications backed by scientific evidence. The presentation will discuss the implications of these results for designing policy that balances market incentives with patient privacy and care quality.

Teaser: Simon will be holding a separate, short workshop on the reproducible research tools used at his institute. Join us to learn how to implement these transparent workflows in your own analysis. 

Motherhood is associated with persistent penalties in both labour market outcomes and health. However, the role of family policies in mitigating these effects, particularly with respect to maternal mental health, remains unclear. This paper examines the impact of extending paternity leave on maternal mental health. Using administrative health records covering all publicly funded births in Catalonia (Spain) between 2006 and 2024, we implement a local difference-in-differences design around the April 1st, 2019 reform, which introduced partially mandatory paternity leave for fathers. The analysis focuses on first time mothers giving birth within a three-month window around the reform cutoff and compares them to a control cohort from 2016. Maternal mental health is measured using diagnoses and prescription records for stress-related, mood-related, and broader mental health conditions drawn from primary care and pharmacy data. We find an increase in stress-related diagnoses and in the use of antidepressants and anxiolytics from the second year after childbirth among mothers exposed to the reform. These effects are concentrated among older mothers (above the median age of 31) and among those who do not have a second child within four years after birth. We find suggestive evidence that these patterns may be related to increased healthcare use and to stress-related mechanisms, including delayed fertility, changes in labour market attachment, and relationship instability. Ongoing work will extend the analysis to additional mental health outcomes and to subsequent paternity leave reforms