Discussion Paper No. 585
September 9, 2026
The Supply-Side Effect of Immigration on Prices: Evidence from Nursing Homes
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Abstract:
We study how immigration affects prices through changes in labor supply. Using policy-driven increases in immigration to Germany and administrative data covering the universe of nursing homes, we find that one additional foreign-born woman per 100 residents reduces nursing-home care prices by 2.6 percent. The price effects are concentrated in more competitive markets. Examining potential mechanisms, we find that immigration lowers labor costs as nursing homes shift toward lower-paid foreign-born workers. We find no evidence of declines in inspection-based measures of quality or of scale effects. Finally, immigration increases the use of informal care, potentially strengthening competitive pressure from the broader care market.
Keywords:
immigration; labor supply; prices; nursing homes;
JEL-Classification:
J61; F22; J30;
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Discussion Paper No. 582
Gambling for Retirement: The Hidden Costs of Savings Lotteries in a Nationwide Experiment
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Governments increasingly encourage socially desirable behavior with probabilistic incentives. We study such “Pigouvian lotteries” in a retirement-savings field experiment with 387,000 workers in Colombia’s public pension system. The lotteries induce sharp bunching at qualification thresholds, but workers mostly meet them by retiming rather than increasing deposits, leaving overall savings largely unaffected. Lotteries further crowd out valuable life and disability insurance and disproportionately reward wealthier savers. A welfare analysis shows that, once we account for these unintended consequences, lotteries reduce welfare. Our findings illustrate that behavioral spillovers across time and choice domains can reverse the verdict on behavioral public policies.
Keywords:
retirement savings; prize-linked savings; paternalism; informality; household finance;
JEL-Classification:
D14; D91; H55; C93; G52;
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Discussion Paper No. 584
Fairness Views and Beliefs about the International Distribution of Climate Change Costs
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Abstract:
International climate negotiations focus on three distinct climate change costs: mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage. This paper measures voters' fairness views about how these costs should be allocated between nations, and investigates whether fairness views and beliefs about a country's responsibility matter for policy support. In an online survey experiment, the paper finds that fairness views vary with the type of cost, that voters underestimate their country responsibility, and that fairness views and beliefs jointly predict voters' climate policy preferences. The paper also implements tailored treatments to test whether fairness views and beliefs causally affect policy support, but it finds no evidence of a causal link. The results highlight that, to be consistent with citizens' fairness ideals, the international distribution of mitigation costs should differ from the one of adaptation and loss and damage.
Keywords:
climate change; international negotiations; policy support; fairness; misperceptions;
JEL-Classification:
D63; D91; F53; H41; Q54;
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Discussion Paper No. 583
Re-fielding Replicability of Silicon Sample-based Marketing Research
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Abstract:
Large language models are increasingly used to generate silicon samples, synthetic respondents that stand in for human participants in behavioral research. As silicon samples enter the methodological mainstream, the question of their re-fielding replicability becomes critical: when researchers regenerate a silicon sample under the same procedure at a later point in time, how stable are the resulting data? Existing validation studies have compared LLM-generated responses to human responses at a single point in time, but the temporal consistency of silicon samples themselves (whether independent reapplications of the same generation procedure yield comparable samples) has not been examined systematically, especially under sparse-conditioning, re-fielded sample-generation settings. We address this gap by generating silicon samples across three weekly waves, permitting a re-fielding consistency assessment. We benchmark this assessment with a human reference sample recruited via Prolific. Moreover, we systematically compare three structurally distinct generation paradigms that try to increase response variability: single-prompt batch generation, iterative generation with cumulative memory, and two-stage seed-and-expand generation. We find that re-fielding consistency is reasonably high in aggregate and comparable to the human benchmark for the strongest paradigm (two-stage seed-and-expand) but markedly lower for single-prompt batch generation. In contrast, alignment with the human reference is generally low, so that silicon samples reproduce their own outputs more faithfully than they reproduce human data. This means that silicon samples can be internally reproducible without being externally valid.
Keywords:
silicon samples; synthetic data; replicability; consistency; sustainability; plant-based meat;
JEL-Classification:
C83; C52; C45; M31; Q56; D12;
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Discussion Paper No. 581
The Making of the German Model of Industrial Relations
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This paper studies how collective bargaining institutions emerged from competition within the labor movement. We draw on newly assembled data on strikes, union membership, and bargaining agreements at the county-occupation level in Imperial Germany around 1900. Three rival factions competed for control of the labor movement: the social-democratic Free Trade Unions, the radical unions, and the moderate unions, divided over whether to confront employers, negotiate with them, or both. The Free Trade Unions struck more effectively than the radical unions and bargained far more than the moderate ones. Instrumenting Free Trade Union strength with distance to their headquarters, we show that stronger organization raised the likelihood that agreements emerged. Strike activity rose ahead of first agreements and fell thereafter. The effect is concentrated in multi-employer agreements with peace obligations, the bargaining form that later defined the German model. Organized employers played little part in this process. Durable bargaining institutions emerged where a movement could both sustain conflict and commit to settling it.
Keywords:
labor conflict; collective bargaining agreement; unions; endogenous institutions;
JEL-Classification:
N33; J51; J52; D72;
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Discussion Paper No. 580
July 31, 2026
Perceived Teammate Identity and Cooperative Behavior in Hybrid Human–Artificial Agent Teams
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We study how perceived teammate identity shapes effort allocation in hybrid human–artificial agent teams in collaborative environments. In a real-effort online experiment and under different incentive schemes, fixed payment and team competition, participants work in a team where each team member is responsible for their own segment but can observe and intervene in teammates’ segments. Teammates are algorithmically controlled agents, framed as either artificial or human-like, with their actual behavior held constant across treatments. Participants exert approximately one-third less compensatory effort when teammates are presented with human-like cues than when they are transparently labeled as artificial, and this difference is robust across both incentive schemes. The pattern is consistent with a model in which perceived human identity reduces the non-monetary benefit of helping. The result highlights that in hybrid teams, the labeling and presentation of artificial collaborators have economically meaningful consequences for cooperative effort and the organization of team production.
Keywords:
human–ai collaboration; online experiment; team incentives; teamwork; tournaments;
JEL-Classification:
C91; D29; D83; D89;
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Discussion Paper No. 579
July 5, 2026
Ports, Technology and Inter-City Trade: The Economics and Geopolitics of Evolving Maritime Transport Networks
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Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and shipping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granular data—digitized historical shipping records, georeferenced ship movements, and shipment-level routing information—we present five stylized facts on the structure and evolution of the maritime network. Global shipping activity is highly concentrated among a changing lineup of dominant top ports even as lower-ranked ports disperse, while state-owned Chinese port terminal operators increasingly account for these global volumes, boosting overall port operations while delivering efficiency gains mostly to Chinese vessels. We use these facts to organize a synthesis of a fast-growing literature: containerization reshaped which port cities could expand, reinforced hub-and-spoke concentration that yields large but localized welfare gains, embedded ports in multimodal networks that amplify the returns to infrastructure, and generated market power, congestion, and environmental costs. Together, this evidence shows how evolving maritime technologies simultaneously deepen global integration and heighten the economic and geopolitical importance of critical nodes in the transport network—and of who controls them.
Keywords:
transport networks; ports; international trade; trade costs; containerization; geoeconomics;
JEL-Classification:
F13; F14; R41; R42;
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Discussion Paper No. 578
Different Consumption Responses to Equivalent Changes in the Real Interest Rate
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Abstract:
We study how individuals adjust consumption in response to changes in the real interest rate using a large, preregistered, within-subject survey experiment on a representative sample of the German population. Respondents evaluate hypothetical scenarios in which the real interest rate rises by five percentage points through either an increase in the nominal interest rate or an equivalent decline in inflation. While classic intertemporal choice models predict identical responses across these scenarios, we find a clear asymmetry: respondents plan sizable cuts in consumption, higher saving, and lower borrowing when nominal rates increase, yet adjust these margins much less when inflation falls. Differences in perceived wealth effects may contribute to this asymmetry, but they cannot fully explain it. Rising nominal interest rates appear to provide stronger incentives to increase saving and avoid borrowing than does declining inflation. Declining inflation is also associated with more contradictory choices, for example, reporting higher consumption and higher saving while leaving borrowing unchanged. Together, these findings suggest that respondents more readily internalize the consequences of nominal interest rate changes than of disinflation, which has implications for the design and communication of monetary policy.
Keywords:
consumption; real interest rate; inflation expectations; survey;
JEL-Classification:
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Discussion Paper No. 577
June 14, 2026
Matching for Risk-Taking: Overconfident Bankers and Government-Protected Banks
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We set up a simple theoretical model in which banks with varying degrees of government support are matched with CEOs that have different degrees of overconfidence. The channel through which the matching occurs is the share of bonus payments offered by banks in their profit-maximizing contracts. This yields a sequence of hypotheses when CEOs can freely choose risk levels: banks with more government support incentivize their CEOs more and this disproportionately attracts overconfident CEOs. In equilibrium this in turn leads to an assortative matching between overconfident managers and banks with a larger bailout probability. We then test the hypotheses derived from this model for U.S. data spanning both the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid Crisis. Our results confirm the hypotheses from our theoretical model for normal years, but not during crises and periods of enhanced regulation.
Keywords:
matching; overconfidence; incentive contracts; bailouts;
JEL-Classification:
G21; G28; H32;
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Discussion Paper No. 576
Motivating Crowdworkers with Nonmonetary Incentives and Payment Framing—Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment
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Abstract:
An increasing number of individuals worldwide are participating in crowdwork and tele-work. They often perform tasks such as AI training and content moderation. While these tasks are typically conducted in large quantities and often involve routine elements, their nature makes them inherently demanding. They require high levels of engagement or creativity and produce outputs of subjective quality that are difficult to measure. In a preregistered field experiment involving over 5,500 crowdworkers, we examined the impact of automated recognition and work-appreciation phrases and payment framing on motivation, performance, and job satisfaction. The results indicate that recognition—automated phrases: Great work! You did a good job! Nice job! Well done!—positively influences subjective job satisfaction, and that loss-framed payment is somewhat more effective than gain framing. Overall, the treatments have little effect on objective and subjective performance and moti-vation.
Keywords:
crowdworkers; complex tasks; routine; automated motivation; nonmonetary incentives; recognition and appreciation; loss and gain framework; experiment;
JEL-Classification:
J33; J24; M54; M52; D83; C93;