Empirical Analyses of Societal Challenges: Social Cohesion, Labor Market Transition and Population Health

Abstract

This dissertation explores three dimensions of societal well-being. Chapter 1 focuses on social cohesion and its relationship with schooling. Chapter 2 analyzes the effect of internships in terms of young people’s transition to the labor market. Chapter 3 investigates population health and air pollution in the context of urban environmental cohesion. The three chapters of this dissertation are connected through the overarching topic of societal well-being and through the application of causal empirical methods. Each chapter is, nevertheless, self-contained and seeks to answer a specific research question. Chapter 1 shows that an additional year of schooling reduces the probability of individuals and their children being very concerned about immigration. To isolate the exogenous variation in years of schooling, we use the staggered extension of compulsory schooling in West Germany between 1949 and 1969 in an instrumental variable design. The study estimates that an additional year of education reduces the probability of being concerned about immigration by around six percentage points. We also document large intergenerational spillovers. Furthermore, exploring an array of potential mechanisms, we find that labor market outcomes do not appear to be mediators of this effect. Instead, we show that social trust increases with an additional year of schooling, and this higher social trust potentially explains the lower level of concern about immigration. Chapter 2 studies the effect of university internships on the labor market outcomes of young people up to five years after their graduation. This study exploits variation in the introduction and the discontinuation of mandatory internships within a field of study. We use two instrumental variable approaches. First, we instrument internship completion with mandatory internships. As a second instrumental variable, we use the share of students reporting mandatory internships for their cohort and field of study in a leave-one-out fashion. Both instrumental variables imply large returns to internships. On average, our estimates suggest that students who completed an internship earn 6–14 percent higher wages after graduation. The findings also show that students who completed an internship face a lower risk of unemployment. The return of internships is especially pronounced for students who graduate from a field of studies with a weak labor market orientation. Chapter 3 shows that targeted urban environmental policies may reduce air pollution and may have a positive impact on population health. Using the considerable variation in the timing of the implementation of low emission zones in German cities, this study shows that particulate matter (𝑃𝑀10) and nitrogen dioxide (𝑁𝑂2) concentrations decreased in treated cities. Further, analysis of the outpatient health diagnosis data shows that due to this decrease in pollution, the number of people diagnosed with cardiovascular disease declined by 2–3 percent. Slicing the population by age groups, I show that those over the age of 65 especially benefited from the policy.