Using survey experiments in the United States and Germany with about 12,000 participants, we study perceptions of socioeconomic inequality in life expectancy and policy demand. Respondents overestimate the rich-poor gap in both countries, judging the life expectancy of the rich roughly accurately but placing that of the poor well below its true level. These misperceptions vary little with political orientation or other characteristics. Correcting them shifts concern but leaves policy demand largely unchanged across general, specific, and real-stakes measures. Instead, demand divides politically, sharply in the United States and much less in Germany, consistent with views about the role of government rather than the inequality itself shaping policy demand.

In this study, establishment-level employment effects of investment grants in Germany are estimated. In addition to the quantitative effects, I provide empirical evidence of funding effects on different aspects of employment quality (earnings, qualifications, and job security) for the period 2004 to 2020. The database combines project-level treatment data, establishment-level information on firm characteristics and employee structure, and regional information at the district level. For the estimations, I combine the difference-in-differences approach of Callaway and Sant’Anna (J Econom 2252: 200–230, 2021) with ties matching at the cohort level. The estimations yield positive effects on the number of employees, but point to contradicting effects of investment grants on different aspects of employment quality.

Intergenerational justice is a core principle of sustainability, yet empirical metrics on the impact of business on future generations remain scarce. Moreover, evidence suggests that different ESG scores capture distinct dimensions of corporate responsibility, highlighting the need for more targeted assessments. This study examines the relationship between corporate engagement with children’s rights and financial performance using a dataset of 1672 firm-year observations, combining a novel children’s rights benchmark with Refinitiv’s financial and sustainability metrics. Results indicate a negative association between marketplace ratings, assessing firms’ child welfare considerations in marketing, and accounting-based profitability, even when controlling for ESG subscores. However, no similar relationship emerges in stock market performance. These findings highlight potential tensions between corporate responsibility and short-term financial outcomes, emphasizing the role of regulatory frameworks and stakeholder engagement in balancing financial and social objectives.

Using a newly collected dataset at the plant level from 2014 to 2018, we provide the first microscopic portrait of robotization in Germany and study the correlates of robot adoption. Our descriptive analysis uncovers five stylized facts: (1) Robot use is relatively rare. (2) The distribution of robots is highly skewed. (3) New robot adopters contribute substantially to the recent robotization. (4) Robot users are exceptional. (5) Heterogeneity in robot types matters. Our regression results further suggest plant size, high-skilled labor share, exporter status, and labor shortage to be strongly associated with the future probability of robot adoption.

In this paper, I study technological change as a candidate for the observed increase in consumption inequality in the United States. I build an incomplete market model with educational choice combined with a task-based model on the production side. I consider two channels through which technology affects inequality: the skill that an agent can supply in the labor market and the level of capital she owns. In a quantitative analysis, I show that (i) the model replicates the increase in consumption inequality between 1981 and 2008 in the US (ii) educational choice and the return to wealth are quantitatively important in explaining the increase in consumption inequality.

We observe that public firms are more likely to issue seasoned stocks rather than bonds when theirs boards are more socially-connected. These connected issuers experience better announcement-period stock returns and attract more institutional investors. This social-connection effect is stronger for firms with severe information asymmetry, higher risk of being undersubscribed, and more visible to investors. Our conjecture is this social-network effect is driven by trust in issuing firms. Given stocks are more sensitive to trust, these trusted firms are more likely to issue stocks than bonds. Trustworthiness plays an important role in firms’ security issuances in capital markets.

Using a newly collected dataset of robot use at the plant level from 2014 to 2018, we provide the first microscopic portrait of robotisation in Germany and study the potential determinants of robot adoption. Our descriptive analysis uncovers five stylised facts concerning both extensive and, perhaps more importantly, intensive margin of plant-level robot use: (1) Robot use is relatively rare with only 1.55% German plants using robots in 2018. (2) The distribution of robots is highly skewed. (3) New robot adopters contribute substantially to the recent robotisation. (4) Robot users are exceptional along several dimensions of plant-level characteristics. (5) Heterogeneity in robot types matters. Our regression results further suggest plant size, low-skilled labour share, and exporter status to have strong and positive effect on future probability of robot adoption. Manufacturing plants impacted by the introduction of minimum wage in 2015 are also more likely to adopt robots. However, controlling for plant size, we find that plant-level productivity has no, if not negative, impact on robot adoption.