The report focuses on local refugee integration policy and its implementation by the public administration in Cologne. It starts by outlining the general administrative and social structures and traditions in Germany´s fourth most populous city and then turns to refugee integration in detail. The city understands integration as a long-term political goal cutting across various administrative departments. Therefore, several public bodies are involved in making and implementing integration policy. Coordinating entities have been introduced recently to facilitate the integration of refugees. Furthermore, the report highlights the specific integration policies of the city in the four research areas of the project: employment, education, vulnerable groups and social assistance. In these fields, Cologne implements federal and state programs. Additionally, the city deploys an integration budget in order to set up and subsidize local projects targeting the special needs of migrants and refugees. In most of these programmes, the municipality does not provide the services for refugees itself, but relies on the cooperation with non-profit organizations. They range from longstanding welfare associations to newly formed initiatives and migrant organizations. The report presents the involvement of these non-profit organizations in the policy fields under study.

Nach dem Pisa-Schock hat die frühe Bildung in Kindertagesstätten (Kita) eine Aufwertung erfahren. Kognitiv-anregende Interaktionen der Erzieherinnen haben dabei besonders positiven Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der Kinder. Seit Jahren gibt es Fortbildungen zu diesem Thema, jedoch ohne direkte Verbesserung der Interaktionsprozesse in den Kitas selbst. Für die Zukunftsforschung stellen solche Phänomene ein interessantes Untersuchungsfeld dar, um die Hemmnisse von zukunftsrelevanten Denkweisen und Innovationen in sozialen System zu erforschen und mit geeigneten Maßnahmen zur Förderung dieser beizutragen. Zentrale Forschungsfrage dieser Thesis ist deshalb wie bei gegebener sozialer Netzwerkstruktur und unter Berücksichtigung der individuellen Einstellungen die Akzeptanz von zukunftsrelevanten Denkmustern in Kleingruppen gefördert werden kann. Aufbauend auf dem Modell „InnoMind“ konnte eine agentenbasierte Modellierung für die Analyse integraler Zukünfte erstellt werden. Dabei wurden unterschiedliche Aspekte aus den vier Quadranten: I (Einstellung), It (Verhalten), We (soziale Beziehungen), Its (Meinungsaustausch) abgebildet und dessen komplexe Wechselwirkungen in Beziehung gesetzt. Innerhalb der Simulation wurde eine Kita mittels eigens erhobener, empirischer Daten simuliert und unterschiedliche Maßnahmen zur Förderung von innovativen Interaktionsformen getestet. Zur Verifizierung wurde zudem eine fiktive Kita simuliert und die Ergebnisse beider miteinander verglichen. Die genaue Betrachtung der Simulationsergebnisse trug zum Verständnis bei, unter welchen Umständen die gegenwärtige Struktur mentaler Repräsentationen, psychologischer Motive und sozialer Einfluss Einschränkungen bei zukünftigen Möglichkeiten für organisatorische Veränderungen hervorrufen können.

“Community energy” is a highly contested issue not only in the German energy transition governance but also in the recent legislative procedure to recast energy market legislation within the EU’s “Winter Package”. This paper analyses effects of the German provisions to privilege “community energy ac-tors” against the background of the objectives of the revised German renewable energy policy. It finds that the results of these provisions for community energy actors in the German auction scheme do not just represent an acceptable level of losses due to recognized trade-offs between the three main objectives – controlled RE expansion, actor plurality and cost efficiency – but instead a complete failure with regard to all three of these objectives. The paper suggests to clearly distinguish between the risks for small actors to take part in auctions from the added value, provided by these actors. This approach will help to define the necessary policy design elements that are suitable to enable small and community energy actors to participate in energy market activities, to provide the politically desired benefits, and to prevent disastrous policy failures similar to those in the German case.

In Spence’s (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers’ productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre–employment auditing to learn workers’ productivities. We characterize the trade–offs between signaling by workers and costly information acquisition by firms. Information acquisition is always associated with (partial) pooling of worker types, and education is used as a signal only if relatively few workers have low productivity. Our analysis applies also to other signaling problems, e.g. the financial structure of firms, warranties, and initial public offerings.

Existing literature on cross-national variation in violence has paid little attention to the transnational transmission of crime. One such channel are the forced returns of migrants with a criminal record in their countries of temporary residence. Responding to this research gap, we study the effect of US deportations of convicts on levels of violent crime in deportees’ countries of origin for a cross-country panel of up to 123 countries covering the years 2003 to 2015. We find a strong and robust effect of criminal deportations on homicide rates in countries of origin, that is to a large degree driven by deportations towards Latin America and the Caribbean. An additional inflow of ten deportees with a criminal history per 100,000 increases expected homicide rates by more than two. In addition to controlling for country-specific fixed effects, we provide evidence on a causal effect using an instrumental variable approach, that exploits spatial and time variation in migrant populations’ exposure to state level immigration policies in the US

Rising poverty and inequality increases the risk of social instability in countries all around the world. For measuring poverty and inequality there exists a variety of statistical indicators. Estimating these indicators is trivial as long as the income variable is measured on a metric scale. However, estimation is not possible, using standard formulas, when the income variable is interval censored (or grouped), as in the German Microcensus. This is the case for numerous censuses due to confidentiality constraints or in order to decrease item non-response. To enable the estimation of statistical indicators in these scenarios, we propose an iterative kernel density algorithm that generates metric pseudo samples from the interval censored income variable. Based on these pseudo samples, poverty and inequality indicators are estimated. The standard errors of the indicators are estimated by a non-parametric bootstrap. Simulation results demonstrate that poverty and inequality indicators from interval censored data can be unbiasedly estimated by the proposed kernel density algorithm. Also the standard errors are correctly estimated by the non-parametric bootstrap. The kernel density algorithm is applied in this work to estimate regional poverty and inequality indicators from German Microcensus data. The results show the regional distribution of poverty and inequality in Germany.

El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala count among today’s most violent countries of the world. Qualitative research has claimed that large-scale deportations of Central American convicts have played an important role for the spread of gangs and rampant violence in the region. Using a novel identification strategy, this paper provides the first econometric evidence for this hypothesis from the case of El Salvador. Regarding the dependent variable, the policy experiment of a truce between rivaling gangs in 2012 allows to single out gang-related killings from overall homicide rates. The explanatory variable exploits subnational variation in the exposure of migrant communities to exogenous conditions in the host country. Violence spilled over to migrants’ places of origin when migrant corridors developed around US destinations with high pre-existing levels of violent crime. The cross-sectional evidence is backed by panel data analysis dating back to 1999. The annual inflow of convicts translated into rising homicides mainly in those municipalities whose migrants were exposed to high pre-existing crime at destination, whereas deportations of non-convicts did not have the same effect. These finding are in line with evidence on the origin of Central American gangs in US cities and convicts’ return to their places of birth after massive deportations since the mid-1990s.

Competing definitions of justice in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics indicate the existence of two distinct economic systems with different normative priorities. The three-class society of the Platonic economy (guardians, auxiliaries, producers) gives rise to guardians who by virtue are expected to enforce output targets on producers directly or through auxiliaries. The three-class society of the Aristotelian economy (rich, middle, poor) facilitates the emergence of different ruling coalitions and compensates efficiency losses of vertical production processes with political gains derived from representative governance. In the Aristotelian economy, the middle class is better off than in the Platonic economy (auxiliaries), because a just society (polity) is achieved under its rule. I argue that the equilibrium solutions of the Platonic and Aristotelian systems provide the normative foundations for the distinction between plan and market.

Research on the conjunction of business elites and sustainable development fascinates practitioners and international organizations but faces methodological and data collection challenges within academia. Firstly, studies on corporate sustainability have promptly increased but have been extremely focused on an organizational level of analysis, which inhibits figuring out whether business decisions have an impact at the macro or societal level. Secondly, major policy recommendations on sustainable development point to the creation of networks and partnerships among business elites, governments and civil organizations but it is largely ignored which specific type of network configuration goes along with sustainable development. Thirdly, the literature on sustainable development often considered business elites as homogenous and concentrated, even though conflicting views exist regarding aspects of sustainable development. Finally, the influence of business elites on environmental, social and economic policies has been more supposed than empirically demonstrated. Past research has been unable to overcome these challenges in part due to insufficient data clarifying the full breadth of business elite connections with political and civil organizations nationally and transnationally, and the lack of a combination of analytical tools for analyzing multilevel characteristics and actions. The present paper proposes a research agenda to comprehend the role of business elites in sustainable development. Future studies should use network analysis as leverage, uncover the networks among business and political elites, focus on Latin American economies and regions, bypass case studies and develop cross-national and transnational analysis, and turn to a combination of causal methods.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is more than a set of goals and targets: it is a comprehensive “plan of action” that countries are translating into relevant policies. While this plan recognizes a need for different national paths towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it also provides guidance for policymaking, establishing means of implementation and follow-up and review mechanisms that are indivisible from the SDGs. Moreover, analyzing the 2030 Agenda as a framework for policymaking reveals general principles that are both explicit and implicit in the UN’s Transforming Our World document. After examining previous relevant UN and OECD frameworks; official 2030 Agenda documents; current international literature on the SDGs, and consulting key 2030 Agenda stakeholders in Peru, this paper identifies eight general principles for sustainable development policymaking in 2030 Agenda implementation that are relevant to all SDGs and sectors, and suggests areas for further research.

In recent years, a series of crises have hit the European Union (i.e., the Eurozone crisis, the sovereign debt crises, the Great Recession, the refugee crisis, Brexit). Such precarious times have challenged solidarity both between European citizens, as well as between the Member States of the EU. The current paper investigates the degree of European solidarity in the European Union in the light of these developments. The paper describes the preliminary findings of a recent research project conducted on European solidarity. We surveyed citizens of 13 Members States of the EU about their disposition toward (European) solidarity. An upcoming book will offer an elabo-rate theoretical framework about the existence of European solidarity. Additionally, this book will also presents detailed results from the project and indepth discussion of the findings. However, we decided to publish some of the descriptive results beforehand in the form of this report as the major findings of our study have high public and political relevance. The development of recent crises has been rather fastpaced, and is in contrast with the long wait that comes with the publication of academic texts. So, the latter process hinders the most important information to reach the public and policy makers as soon as possible and this report wishes to remedy it slightly.

In Chapter 1, we will elaborate on the conceptual framework of our study. By Euro-pean solidarity, we understand a form of solidarity expanded beyond one’s own na-tion state; recipients of solidarity are other EU countries, or citizens living in another EU country. In the first part of Chapter 1, we systematically distinguish between four different domains of European solidarity: (1) Fiscal solidarity, defined as citizens’ willingness to support indebted European countries financially. (2) Welfare state solidarity, defined as citizens’ strong agreement to support those in need – unemployed, sick, and the elderly – regardless of where they live in the EU, and to reduce inequality between rich and poor people in Europe. (3) Territorial solidarity, the willingness to reduce inequality between poor and rich EU countries. (4) Finally, the refugee crisis has raised the question of (4.1) external solidarity, defined as the support for the EU to grant asylum to refugees coming from outside of EU, and (4.2) internal solidarity, defined as a strong agreement with how Member States should share the burden of distributing refugees among themselves. In the second part of Chapter 1, we define different criteria for determining the strength of European solidarity.

In Chapters 2 to 5, we will apply the explicated criteria for the existence of European solidarity to each of the four domains of solidarity. By doing so, we can determine the strength of European solidarity in each domain of solidarity. As this report aims at giving a first overview of some of our results, we will apply two of the four theoreti-cally developed criteria of European solidarity to the four domains only and present the corresponding descriptive results.

Overall, our analyses reveal some unanticipated findings. Europeans altogether display a notably higher level of solidarity with citizens of other EU countries and EU states than many politicians and social scientists have so far presumed. This especially applies to the support of people in need (welfare state solidarity) and the reduction of wealth inequalities between rich and poor European countries (territorial solidarity), but also to the domain of fiscal solidarity. On top of this, European solidarity turns out to be more established than the global one.

However, this optimistic view is not valid for the domain of solidarity with refugees. Whilst citizens of western and southern European countries support both, the ac-ceptance of refugees and the fair distribution of the incurring costs and burdens be-tween European countries, the majority of people in eastern European countries do not share this point of view.

The report outlines the local refugee integration policy and its implementation by the public administration in Berlin. It starts by giving an overview of the political, administrative and social structures in the German capital, before presenting in more detail the responsibilities for refugee integration policy. A number of public bodies are involved in making and implementing integration policy, and tasks are shared between the city and the district levels of the city-state Berlin. Moreover, the content of integration policies is explained, focusing on the four research areas of the project: employment, education, vulnerable groups and social assistance. Berlin draws on a number of federal, state and local programs to support refugee integration, e.g. in terms of providing training, language tuition, health care services, accommodation and counselling. Many of these services are not provided directly, but by a broad variety of non-profit organizations. Some of them have been active in Berlin for years, whereas others have emerged in response to the increase in refugee migration in 2015/16. The city cooperates with these organizations in a number of ways, some of which will be researched in more detail in the upcoming case studies of the project.

Peru has made great progress in reducing poverty and inequality in the past decade alongside high economic growth. Albeit this progress, the incidence of poverty and inequality remain high. This paper examines the distributional and poverty impact of the public tax and transfer system in Peru. It applies an extended income approach that accounts for the value of publicly-provided health, education and childcare services. Accounting for public services is important since unequal access to basic services is a main development challenge for low and middle income countries. We find that public social spending reduces overall inequality by almost 7 Gini points. This reduction is mainly driven by in-kind bene fits while the impact of taxation and direct cash transfers is small. Income differentials within regions explain approximately four fifths of overall inequality compared to diffierences between regions, which explain about one fifth. This ratio remains largely unaffected by public redistribution. Mean levels of welfare vary widely across regions. This is also because social spending achieves litte poverty reduction. It decreases absolute poverty by 2-3 percentage points in terms of monetary income and up to 9 percentage points or 25% when accounting for public service use. The largest share of the poor, over 50%, are not reached by social assistance. To tackle poverty more effectively, transfer levels and coverage need to be increased. Current policies seem insuffcient to achieve a more equitable income distribution.

This paper analyzes the optimal contract for a consumer to procure a credence good from an expert when (i) the expert might misrepresent his private information about the consumer’s need, (ii) the expert might not choose the requested service since his choice of treatment is non-observable, and (iii) limited liability of the expert precludes imposing penalty payments on him. We characterize payments under the optimal contract and show that, compared with the first-best, these induce inefficient undertreatment. We further show that separating diagnosis and treatment increases consumer surplus. Whether it decreases or increases the likelihood of undertreatment, however, depends on the accuracy of the expert’s information.