Projects

When do people want more redistributive taxes? Although several countries in Europe have experienced rising levels of inequality in the last couple of decades, public demands for redistributive taxes remained on similar levels or even decreased. In this dissertation, I argue that we can understand this phenomenon by acknowledging the role of limited public information about inequality and tax rates and the importance of fairness heuristics in enabling individuals to demand redistribution by taxes. Utilizing data from the European Social Survey and experimental web surveys conducted in Austria, this dissertation tests these theoretical arguments empirically.

This project aims to visualize the transformation of work during the COVID-19 pandemic. It cooperates with the Austrian Corona Panel Project and develops survey waves that focus on topics surrounding changes in work itself or work related attitudes and preferences. The main goal of the project is to create a website to provide the public with tools to investigate changes in attitudes, behaviour and preferences themselves via an interactive dashboard.

The Austrian Corona Panel Project is the largest social survey project to cover the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria. To date (Nov. 2021) the panel covers nearly two years of the pandemic fielding 26 survey waves with roughly 1500 respondents each wave. The dataset contains over 1000 variables and is publicly available.

The project JUSAW (Jung und auf der Suche nach Arbeit in Wien = Young and searching a job in Vienna) investigated the consequences of early carrer unemployment in Austria’s capital Vienna. The project conducted a two wave panel study at the start of an unemployment spell and a year afterwards. In addition a field experiment investigated the impact of small nudges on unemployment’s chances to get a job.

Cultural Pathways to Economic Self-Sufficiency and Enterpreneurship was a EU-FP7-SSH funded project of 12 universities led by Jale Tosun from the University of Heidelberg. It aimed at analysing youth unemployment in Europe following the economic crisis. Besides publishing several papers and a book it generated qualitative as well as quantitative data from 14 countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom).