Papers by Mathias Sinning
This paper exploits the existence of the trans-Tasman travel agreement and the availability of co... more This paper exploits the existence of the trans-Tasman travel agreement and the availability of comparable census data in Australia and New Zealand to examine the extent to which individuals respond to different labour market conditions in the two countries (and their subregions), as well as measures of local amenities and cost of living when deciding where to live. Our findings suggest that the trans-Tasman travel agreement did contribute to a mutual exchange of migrants with many similarities regarding the size and human capital endowment of migration flows in both directions. However, considerable differences between the two countries remain with regard to internal, trans-Tasman and other international migration.
Most investigations into the returns to training include educational attainment and labour market... more Most investigations into the returns to training include educational attainment and labour market experience as determinants of earnings. The authors of this study propose that individual skills may also explain why some workers earn more than others. This research investigates the relationship between literacy skills and the incomes of workers in the Australian labour market through the use of the Survey of Aspects of Literacy (SAL) and the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALLS) Survey. It also estimates whether the return from literacy skills changed between 1996 and 2006, and how returns vary with level of education.
Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Jul 12, 2012
The details of the relevant licence conditions are available on the Creative Commons website The ... more The details of the relevant licence conditions are available on the Creative Commons website The Creative Commons licence conditions do not apply to all logos, graphic design, artwork and photographs. Requests and enquiries concerning other reproduction and rights should be directed to the Older Australians and the edu.au>
Social Science Research Network, 2011
We use 2009 Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) data to link institutional arran... more We use 2009 Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) data to link institutional arrangements in OECD countries to the disparity in reading, math, and science test scores for migrant and native-born students. We fi nd that achievement gaps are larger for those migrant youths who arrive later and for those who do not speak the test language at home. Institutional arrangements often serve to mitigate the achievement gaps of some migrant students while leaving unaff ected or exacerbating those of others. For example, earlier school starting ages help migrant youths in some cases, but by no means in all. Limited tracking on ability appears benefi cial for migrants' relative achievement, while complete tracking and a large private school sector appear detrimental. Migrant students' achievement relative to their native-born peers suff ers as educational spending and teachers' salaries increase, but is improved when examination is a component of the process for evaluating teachers.
We use 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data to link institutional arra... more We use 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data to link institutional arrangements in OECD countries to the disparity in reading, math, and science test scores for migrant and native-born students. We find that achievement gaps are larger for migrant youths who arrive at older ages and those who do not speak the test language at home. Institutional arrangements often serve to mitigate the achievement gaps of some migrant students while leaving unaffected or exacerbating those of others. For example, earlier school starting ages help migrant youths in some cases but by no means in all. Limited tracking on ability appears beneficial for migrants' relative achievement, while complete tracking and a large private school sector appear detrimental. Migrant students' achievement relative to their native-born peers suffers as educational spending and teachers' salaries increase, but improves when examination is a component of the process for evaluating teachers.
Social Science Research Network, 2009
This paper examines the eff ect of neighborhood diversity on the nativity gap in homevalue apprec... more This paper examines the eff ect of neighborhood diversity on the nativity gap in homevalue appreciation in Australia. Specifi cally, immigrant homeowners experienced a 41.7 percent increase in median home values between 2001 and 2006, while the median value of housing owned by the native-born increased by 59.4 percent over the same period. We use a semi-parametric decomposition approach to assess the relative importance of the various determinants of home values in producing this gap. We fi nd that the diff erential returns to housing wealth are not related to changes in the nature of the houses or the neighborhoods in which immigrants and native-born homeowners live. Rather, the gap stems from the fact that over time there were diff erential changes across groups in the hedonic prices (i.e., returns) associated with the underlying determinants of home values.
Social Science Research Network, 2012
This paper analyzes the contribution of the socioeconomic and demographic composition of the pool... more This paper analyzes the contribution of the socioeconomic and demographic composition of the pool of employed and unemployed individuals to the dynamics of the labor market in different phases of the business cycle. Using individual level data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we decompose differences in employment status transition rates between economic upswings and downturns into composition effects and behavioral effects. We find that overall composition effects play a minor role for the cyclicality of the unemployment outflow rate, although the contribution of the duration of unemployment is significant. In contrast, composition effects dampen the cyclicality of the unemployment inflow rate considerably. We further observe that the initially positive contribution of composition effects to a higher unemployment outflow rate turns negative over the course of the recession.
Social Science Research Network, 2007
This paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth position of immigrant househ... more This paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth position of immigrant households residing in Australia, Germany and the United States. Our results indicate that in Germany and the United States wealth differentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational attainment and demographic composition of the native and immigrant populations, while income differentials are relatively unimportant in understanding the nativity wealth gap. In contrast, the relatively small wealth gap between Australian-and foreign-born households exists because immigrants to Australia do not translate their relative educational and demographic advantage into a wealth advantage. On balance, our results point to substantial cross-national disparity in the economic well-being of immigrant and native families, which is largely consistent with domestic labor markets and the selection policies used to shape the nature of the immigration flow.
Social Science Research Network, 2013
This paper analyzes the relationship between individuals' locus of control and their savings beha... more This paper analyzes the relationship between individuals' locus of control and their savings behavior, i.e. wealth accumulation, savings rates, and portfolio choices. Locus of control is a psychological concept that captures individuals' beliefs about the controllability of life events and is a key component of self-control. We fi nd that households with an internal reference person save more both in terms of levels and as a percentage of their permanent incomes. Although the locus-of-control gap in savings rates is largest among rich households, the gap in wealth accumulation is particularly large for poor households. Finally, households with an internal reference person and average net worth hold signifi cantly less fi nancial wealth, but signifi cantly more pension wealth, than otherwise similar households with an external reference person.
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2020
This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence on the implications of the timing of remin... more This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence on the implications of the timing of reminders by studying the effect of varying the timing of reminder letters to taxpayers on their payment behavior. The collection of unpaid tax debts constitutes a considerable challenge for tax authorities. We show that varying the timing of a reminder letter has a theoretically ambiguous effect on tax payments. We study the payment behavior of business taxpayers in a field experiment in Australia and find that a simple reminder letter increases the probability of payment by about 25 percentage points relative to a control group that does not receive a letter from the tax authority. However, variation over a three-week period in the timing of the reminder letter has no effect on the probability of payment within seven weeks of the due date. Our findings indicate that sending reminders early results in faster payment of debts with no effect on the ultimate probability of payment.
Selected Topics in Migration Studies, 2023
Research Papers in Economics, 2015
While many countries around the world recognize that the use of taxpayer money for financing high... more While many countries around the world recognize that the use of taxpayer money for financing higher education of students entails a redistribution of resources from the poor to the rich, university education in Germany is largely free, and tuition fees are even widely perceived as unfair. As a result, parents face a higher private share of expenses for the pre-school education than for the university education of their children. The design of a suitable financing mechanism for tuition fees constitutes an important first step towards reducing these imbalances. In this paper, we propose an extension of the publicly funded "BAfoG" loan system. The extended system ("BAfoG Plus") would provide student loans for financing tuition fees of all German students at a real rate of interest of zero percent, similar to the Australian student loan system. To provide default insurance and avoid consumption hardship, the repayment rate of these loans would depend on the taxable i...
Social Science Research Network, 2011
The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and as... more The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and ascribed attributes, notably race and ethnic membership, has regained traction in the social stratifi cation literature. Most studies that consider status exchanges ignore birthplace as a social boundary for status exchanges via couple formation. This paper evaluates the status exchange hypothesis for Australia and the United States, two Anglophone nations with long immigration traditions whose admission regimes place diff erent emphases on skills. A log-linear analysis reveals evidence of status exchange in the United States among immigrants with lower levels of education and mixed nativity couples with foreign-born husbands. Partly because Australian educational boundaries are less sharply demarcated at the postsecondary level, we fi nd weaker evidence for the status exchange hypothesis. Australian status exchanges across nativity boundaries usually involve marriages between immigrant spouses with a postsecondary credential below a college degree and native-born high school graduates.
This papers outlines a panel data retrieval program written for Stata/SE, which allows easier acc... more This papers outlines a panel data retrieval program written for Stata/SE, which allows easier accessing of the German Socio-Economic Panel Data set. Using a drop-down menu system, the researcher selects variables from any and all available years of the panel. The data is automatically retrieved and merged to form a rectangular "wide file". The wide file is transposed to form a "long file", which can be directly used by the Stata panel estimators. The system implements modular data cleaning programs called plugins.
policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions.
This paper investigates the extent to which immigrants in Germany are socially deprived compared ... more This paper investigates the extent to which immigrants in Germany are socially deprived compared to German natives. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social deprivation index typically applied in the literature, immigrants do not necessarily appear to be socially deprived. We propose a weighting scheme that weights components of social deprivation by their subjective contribution to an overall measure of life satisfaction. Using this weighting scheme to calculate an index of social deprivation, we find that immigrants experience a significant degree of social deprivation, confirming much of the economic literature examining the economic assimilation of immigrants in Germany. This result is driven by particularly high weights being attributed to employment. Also the size of the groups “in need ” is smaller when using the innovative weighting scheme, allowing a more precise targeting of economic policy. 1.
AEA Randomized Controlled Trials
This paper investigates the effects of ethnic residential segregation on wages of migrant workers... more This paper investigates the effects of ethnic residential segregation on wages of migrant workers in Australia. We estimate a control function for neighborhood unobservables and account for the non-random sorting of individuals into neighborhoods by instrumenting for neighborhood attributes. The empirical analysis uses data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey in combination with regional information from Census data. Our findings suggest that ethnic residential segregation has a significantly negative effect on wages of skilled migrant workers, while the effect on wages of unskilled migrant workers is insignificant. This result is robust across several empirical approaches. JEL-Classification: F22, R21, R23
IZA DP No. 14253 APRIL 2021 Trying to Make a Good First Impression: A Natural Field Experiment to... more IZA DP No. 14253 APRIL 2021 Trying to Make a Good First Impression: A Natural Field Experiment to Engage New Entrants to the Tax System* Very little is known about the compliance behavior of first-time taxpayers although their tax paying habits may affect the long-run functioning of a tax system. This paper studies the compliance behavior of new entrants to the tax system using data from a large-scale natural field experiment that was implemented in collaboration with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). We examine the effectiveness of a welcome letter from the tax authority that aims to nudge first-time taxpayers to lodge their first income tax return. We compare this letter to a standard letter that emphasizes the possibility of penalties and interest charges. We find that both letters have surprisingly similar effects on tax compliance, suggesting that the main channel through which the letters affect individual behavior is by providing information. By contrast, the type of mess...
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Papers by Mathias Sinning