Please find a detailed research statement here.
Job-Market Paper
The Independent Woman – Locus of Control and Female Labor Force Participation [Latest Version]
Abstract While the majority of economic studies on female labor force participation relies on monetary incentives in order to explain the labor supply decision of women, the research on non-monetary and psychological factors is still relatively scarce. Based on earlier findings from labor economics, this paper focuses on the role of locus of control for the explanation of a woman’s participation decisions. Locus of control (LOC) is a personality trait that measures an individual’s belief about the causal relationship between own behavior and it’s consequences for life and hence is a crucial determinant of subjective expectations about monetary and non-monetary rewards to own efforts. In this paper, LOC is thus theoretically assumed to affect participation probabilities via differences in the relative importance and expected size of monetary and non-monetary incentives for market production. The implications of the theoretical idea are tested using German survey data from the SOEP in a reduced form approach. I find strong indication for a significant positive effect of an internal LOC on a woman’s probability to be available for market production also conditional on commonly known traditional socio-economic determinants of participation. Additionally, the relationship is found to be strongly heterogeneous with respect to determinants of underlying monetary and non-monetary incentives such as family status, existence and age of children as well as cohort and region of living. Those findings strongly support the hypothesis that internal women put a higher weight on social purpose and economic identity as non-monetary incentives for working and thus gain higher marginal utility from participation also conditional on monetary incentives.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Preuss, M. and Hennecke, J. (2018) – Biased by Success and Failure: How Unemployment Shapes Locus of Control. Labour Economics. Volume 53, pp. 63-74. [Details & Download]
Working Papers
Caliendo, M., Cobb-Clark, D.A., Hennecke, J. and Uhlendorff, A. (2015) – Job Search, Locus of Control, and Internal Migration. IZA Discussion Paper No. 9600. [Details & Download]
Work in Progress
Investing in Health but Underestimating Risk – Locus of Control and Health Behavior (with Marco Caliendo)
