Reformation Germany Research Articles

Education Curriculum and Student Achievement: Theory and Evidence

This paper proposes a theory of education curriculum and analyzes its distributional impact on student learning outcomes. Different curricula represent horizontal differentiation in the education technology, thus a curriculum change has distributional effects across students. We test the model using the quasi-natural experiment of the G8 reform in Germany. We find evidence of heterogeneous reform effects consistent with our theory. While the reform improves student test scores on average, such benefits are more pronounced for well-prepared students. In contrast, less-prepared students do not benefit from the reform.

Short- and long-term participation tax rates and their impact on labor supply

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993–2010, we find that recent reforms in Germany increased work incentives at the extensive margin measured by the participation tax rate (PTR), particularly for low-income individuals. Work incentives are even higher if the time horizon is extended to more than one year, pointing at an overestimation of the disincentives by standard measures. Regression analysis reveals that a decrease in the PTR increases the probability of taking up work significantly.

Time for Tough Love: Towards Gradual Risk Transfer to Renewables in Germany

After more than a decade of supporting renewable energies (RE) through feed-in tariffs, Germany has set out to integrate RE into the power market. This requires RE investors to carry market risks, in particular the power price risk. But under the current financial structure higher risks would negatively impact the bankability of new projects, which could endanger the achievement of Germany's RE targets. The need to maintain a non-disruptive investment environment suggests a gradual risk transfer towards market integration in the spirit of what Ball (2012) calls giving RE tough love. In this paper we will spell out how this could be done: in the first step we discuss the general case for market risks and find that past policy reforms have only marginally imposed risks on RE. Hence more ambitious steps are needed, for which we outline two elements in the second step: (a) a support framework that creates incentives for RE projects to increasingly take risks based on a cascading risk auction, and (b) design options for power purchase agreements (PPAs) aimed to incentivize new products for risk management. This approach can inform the upcoming 2017 reform in Germany - and also other countries pursuing similar reforms.

Asset Securitisation in Germany: Risk Transfer or Legal Transformation?

The risks associated with asset securitisations have become the subject of debate since the start of the financial crisis in the summer of 2007. Information asymmetries as well as opportunistic behaviour resulting from an inefficient incentive structure have been identified as causes of the sudden breakdown of the interbank lending market. By looking at the legal reforms in Germany before the outbreak of the financial crisis which aimed at promoting asset securitisations under German law, the legal structure of true sale transactions, as well as emergency measures taken during the financial crisis, this paper will analyse the issues connected with asset securitisation from a different angle. The Legal Theory of Finance regards financial markets as rule-bound systems. Based on the premise that a financial assets value depends on legal vindication, the paper will address the question of whether asset securitisation can be understood as legal transformation instead of as risk transfer. A law-centred approach could help to provide an alternative explanation for the increasing popularity of securitisation transactions before the financial crisis as well as for the absence of any market disciplining effects.

Interview with Professor Philippe Denis

Prof. Philippe Denis is a Senior Professor in History of Christianity at the University of Kwazulu‑Natal. In the 1970s and 1980s, his research focused on the history of the Reformation in Germany, France and The Netherlands, and specifically on issues of confessional development, biblical exegesis, and cultural representations. Over the past two decades, his research focused primarily on the history of indigenous Christianity in southern Africa, along with an interest in oral history. The latter has encouraged him to reflect on issues of memory and resilience, and to found the Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work in Africa.

Explaining Path Dependency and Deviation by Combining Multiple Streams Framework and Historical Institutionalism: A Comparative Analysis of German and Swedish Labor Market Policies

This article shows that combining the multiple streams framework with historical institutionalism can help improve both the understanding and explanation of far-reaching, path-departing policy reforms. This argument is illustrated using two case studies that deal with activating labor market reforms in Germany and Sweden. This comparison highlights that path dependency prevails until policy entrepreneurs use political windows to manipulate the policy-making process by altering policy discourses and thinking until the new paradigm is made compatible with the old order.

Offshoring and labour market reforms in Germany: Assessment and policy implications

Starting from the diagnosis that Germany has had better economic outcomes than most advanced countries since the mid-2000s, we propose a general equilibrium model to answer the following two questions: Why is it so and is the German experience applicable to other EU countries? Whereas a large number of observers explain German competitiveness by the labour market reforms implemented from 2003 to 2005 (Hartz laws), we suggest that (i) the gains in competitiveness are essentially due to offshoring and (ii) the labour market reforms have subsequently reduced the offshoring-related unemployment by decreasing the reservation wage, creating thereby low skilled jobs in non-tradable services. These reforms have also reinforced inequality already generated by offshoring. In contrast with the traditional explanation based on the Hartz reforms, our model findings and simulations fit well with the sequence of observed facts. This experience could be extended to other EU countries, but with higher cost and lower efficiency. Finally, as the reduction in unemployment is based on the extension of non-tradable services, we suggest alternative policies that reach the same goal without increasing inequality.

The Effect of Increasing Education Efficiency on University Enrollment: Evidence from Administrative Data and an Unusual Schooling Reform in Germany

We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on students’ university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time, constituting an efficiency gain from an individual’s perspective. Based on a difference-indifferences approach using administrative data on all students in Germany, we find that this reform decreased enrollment rates. Moreover, students are more likely to delay their enrollment, to drop out of university, and to change their major. Our results show that it is not easy to get around the trade-off between an earlier labor market entry and more years of schooling.

Structural Reform in Germany

Structural Reform in Germany

Structural Reform in Germany

Structural Reform in Germany

Structural Reform in Germany

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the macroeconomic, distributional, and fiscal effects of three reform proposals for Germany: i) a reduction in the social security tax in the low-wage sector, ii) a publicly financed expansion of full-day child care and full-day schooling, and iii) the further deregulation of the professional services sector. The analysis is based on a macroeconomic model with physical capital, human capital, job search, and household heterogeneity. All three reforms have positive short-run and long-run effects on employment, wages, and output. The quantitative effects of the deregulation reform are relatively small due to the smal size of professional services in Germany. Policy reforms i) and ii) have substantial macroeconomic effects and positive distributional consequences. Ten years after implementation, reforms i) and ii) taken together increase employment by 1.6 percent, potential output by 1.5 percent, real hourly pre-tax wages in the low-wage sector by 3 percent, and real hourly pre-tax wages of women with children by 2.7 percent. The two reforms create fiscal deficits in the short run, but they also generate substantial fiscal surpluses in the long-run. They are fiscally efficient in the sense that the present value of short-term fiscal deficits and long-term surpluses is positive for any interest (discount) rate less than 9 percent.

Can Reform Waves Turn the Tide? Some Case Studies Using the Synthetic Control Method

A number of advanced economies carried out a sequence of extensive reforms of their labor and product markets in the 1990s and early 2000s. Using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), this paper implements six case studies of well-known waves of reforms, those of New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Ireland and Netherlands in the 1990s, and the labor market reforms in Germany in the early 2000s. In four of the six cases, GDP per capita was higher than in the control group as a result of the reforms. No difference between the treated country and its synthetic counterpart could be found in the cases of Denmark and New Zealand, which in the latter case may have partly reflected the implementation of reforms under particularly weak macroeconomic conditions. Overall, also factoring in the limitations of the SCM in this context, the results are suggestive of a positive but heterogenous effect of reform waves on GDP per capita.

Can Reform Waves Turn the Tide? Some Case Studies Using the Synthetic Control Method

A number of advanced economies carried out a sequence of extensive reforms of their labor and product markets in the 1990s and early 2000s. Using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), this paper implements six case studies of well-known waves of reforms, those of New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Ireland and Netherlands in the 1990s, and the labor market reforms in Germany in the early 2000s. In four of the six cases, GDP per capita was higher than in the control group as a result of the reforms. No difference between the treated country and its synthetic counterpart could be found in the cases of Denmark and New Zealand, which in the latter case may have partly reflected the implementation of reforms under particularly weak macroeconomic conditions. Overall, also factoring in the limitations of the SCM in this context, the results are suggestive of a positive but heterogenous effect of reform waves on GDP per capita.

The Quincentenary of the Protestant Reformation in Germany

The Quincentenary of the Protestant Reformation in Germany

Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525–1585. By KatHill. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press. 2015. xii + 268pp. £65.00.

Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525–1585. By KatHill. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press. 2015. xii + 268pp. £65.00.

Единоверие и концепция конфессионализации: дискурсивные замечания

This article considers whether ‘confessionalization’ can be used to understand and conceptualise the period of edinoverie reforms between 1905 and 1918. Edinoverie was a missionary movement founded in 1800 by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) that allowed converts from Old Belief to maintain their old rituals in exchange for their loyalty to the Church. The concept of confessionalization was developed by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling in the 1980s to explain religious and social developments in the history of the German Reformation and how these structural processes laid the foundations for the evolution of the absolutist state. The concept puts forward the hypothesis that the religious competition in the aftermath of Luther and Calvin led to the development of strongly delineated confessions and confessional identities, which were propounded and enforced by ever-more comprehensive church administrative organs. The increased level of authority that these administrative bodies gave to church elites allowed for heightened surveillance of behavior and the disciplining of deviancy. The German princes were inherently interested in this process: this frequently led to integration between churches and states, which in turn developed the administrative reach of governments. While the concept is not unproblematic, it has become a cornerstone of historiographical research about the Reformation in both Germany and other European countries: some historians have also applied it to Russia. This article considers the parallels with between confessionalization in Reformation Germany and the programme of edinoverie reforms launched by Father Simeon Shleev after 1905. It argues that, while edinoverie’s peculiarities make it necessary to be cautious when applying confessionalization to this case, conceptualizing edinoverie’s history in the early twentieth century as confessionalization offers numerous benefits to historians.

The Early Reformation in Germany: Between Secular Impact and Radical Vision

Over the last twenty years research on the Reformation in Germany has shifted both chronologically and thematically toward an interest in the ’long’ or ’delayed’ Reformations, and the structure and operation of the Holy Roman Empire. Whilst this focus has resulted in many fascinating new insights, it has also led to the relative neglect of the early Reformation movement. Put together with the explicit purpose of encouraging scholars to reengage with the early ’storm years’ of the German Reformation, this collection of eleven essays by Tom Scott, explores several issues in the historiography of the early Reformation which have not been adequately addressed. The debate over the nature and function of anticlericalism remains unresolved; the mainsprings of iconoclasm are still imperfectly understood; the ideological role of evangelical doctrines in stimulating and legitimising popular rebellion - above all in the German Peasants’ War - remains contentious, while the once uniform view of Anabaptism has given way to a recognition of the plurality and diversity of religious radicalism. Equally, there are questions which, initially broached, have then been sidelined with undue haste: the failure of Reforming movements in certain German cities, or the perception of what constituted heresy in the eyes of the Reformers themselves, and not least, the part played by women in the spread of evangelical doctrines. Consisting of seven essays previously published in scholarly journals and edited volumes, together with three new chapters and an historical afterword, Scott’s volume serves as a timely reminder of the importance of the early decades of the sixteenth century. By reopening seemingly closed issues and by revisiting neglected topics the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what the Reformation in Germany entailed.

Two Steps Forward—One Step Back? Evaluating Contradicting Child Care Policies in Germany

We apply a structural model of mothers’ labor supply and child care choices to evaluate the effects of two childcare reforms in Germany that were introduced simultaneously in August 2013. First, a legal claim to subsidized child care became effective for all children aged one year or older. Second, a new benefit called ‘Betreuungsgeld’ came into effect that is granted to families who do not use public or publicly subsidized child care. Both reforms target children of the same age group and are unconditional on the parents’ income or employment status, yet affect mothers’ incentives for labor supply and child care choices in opposite directions. Our model facilitates estimating the joint reform impact as well as disentangling the individual effects of both policies. A comprehensive data set with information on labor supply, the use of and potential access restrictions to various child care arrangements provides the basis for the empirical analysis. We find the overall effect of both reforms to be small but positive as far as mother’s labor supply and the use of formal care is concerned. The legal claim’s positive impact on mothers’ labor supply and the use of formal child care is largely offset by the negative effect on both outcomes resulting from the introduction of the ‘Betreuungsgeld’.

Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany

Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany

Electricity Market Integration and the Impact of Unilateral Policy Reforms

The harmonization and integration of separate national energy markets to an interconnected internal European market is a top priority of the European Commission. However, as energy policy largely remains subject to national sovereignty, a higher degree of integration can cause unilateral national policies to harm interconnected markets. We investigate the impact of two distinct national reforms in Germany – the phase-out of nuclear power plants after the Fukushima incident and the expansion of renewables promoted by fixed feed-in tariffs and unlimited priority feed-in – on neighbouring countries. We find that the phase-out triggered price increases of up to 19 percent in neighbouring countries whilst the renewable energy support schemes caused a price decrease of up to 0.17 percent for each percent of additional generation from German renewables. We also apply a novel approach to estimate the degree of market integration and find large differences between neighbouring countries in a range from 14 percent to 99 percent. Our findings point up the need for increased efforts to harmonize national energy policies, but also the need to consider the impact of unilateral environmental measures on other countries` supplies in the context of a partially integrated and partly unilateral system.