Research projects
Insuring modern society: A historical-comparative sociology of private insurance, its evolution, origins and consequences
This project proposes a historical-comparative sociology of the private insurance sector in its life and non-life branches (property, transport, etc.) in 20 old OECD countries starting in the late 19th century and 15 emerging economies with shorter coverage (Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe). The insurance sector annually collects about 7% of world GDP as premium income, holds about half of total banking assets and becomes increasingly important in times of rising climate and catastrophe risks. This has strangely been neglected by either historians and economists of finance, with their focus on banks and capital markets, or political scientists, with their strong focus on public insurances within the welfare states. Sociologists themselves have covered “risk sociology” very well, but largely ignored the insurance sector therein. This project aims at filling this gap by building a cross-country historical database of the main stock and flow variables of modern premium-based insurances in order to study their evolution across time and countries, to explain their growth and to investigate selected consequences in three working packages. The first working package will build the insurance database and describe the about 200 years of modern insurance development and will compare its growth trends with those of other financial institutions and the public welfare state. It will also uncover countries’ different insurance growth trajectories. The second working package addresses the question of different growth determinants by mainly looking at often discussed economic and cultural factors, i.e. the relationship between economic development and insurance growth and the potentially Weberian relationship between Protestantism and different denominations and insurance development. A final working package focuses on selected consequences of insurances: does the sector macroeconomically insure against financial and other crises by allowing for quicker economic recoveries? Is there a trade-off between private insurers and public insurance domains, particularly in the pension and accident domain? Overall, the project connects to some questions studied across different disciplines for very short time spans, but plays out a huge data advantage of covering many countries in the long-run. Beyond building a future database for practical use in welfare, finance and securities studies, the project contributes to a potential sociology insurance that connects to Weberian themes of rationalization, to the different worlds of public welfare and the varieties of capitalism.
Reinsuring Catastrophe: The Business and Politics of Reinsurers in Times of Climate Change and Financialization
Reinsurers insure direct insurers against excess losses by diversifying risks across the globe and thus spreading direct non-life and life insurance. Recently, this economic background function has come to the fore of media attention as the rise in reinsurance premiums and even retreat from markets too exposed to climate change has made entire areas and branches uninsurable. Due to their global focus on excess losses, reinsurers have been in a unique position to document and be subjected to climate catastrophes, while they themselves have become increasingly intertwined with capital markets through catastrophe bonds and financial investments. This project aims to uncover the often-hidden financial giants in the reinsurance sector to understand how they reacted to climate change and ongoing processes of financialization. In a first working package, it therefore proposes to build a new database from reinsurance supervision authorities and public reporting to uncover and quantitatively describe the main long-run international trends of the reinsurance sector, covering the main dimensions of reinsurers operating business, financial investments and public stock performance in light of increasing catastrophic losses. This will lay the groundwork for a more qualitative understanding of how reinsurers reacted to climate change and financialization pressures. Working packages 2 and 3 then zoom in on the internal processes of the two biggest world reinsurers, Swiss and Munich Re, through interviews, archival work and process tracing, to understand how these actors have coped with climate change and financialization. Working package 2 will analyze how the firms came across climate-related anomalies starting in the 1970s, built internal risk units and – unlike the oil industry – soon went public with their findings from loss statistics. It will ask how firms reacted epistemically but also in business terms to these findings. Working package 3, in turn, will look at the parallel process of financialization: how did the ‘big two’ become increasingly reliant on catastrophe bonds sold on financial markets and on investment revenue to bail out catastrophe losses? How have they themselves tried to extend financial markets through backing micro-insurances against climate risks in countries in the Global South? Overall, the project looks to contribute to debates in the sociology of finance (and insurance), to business-power approaches and climate sociology, which all have tended to ignore the large reinsurance sector.
Housing Shortage in Germany - An Analysis of Socioeconomic Causes and Effects
A central yet underexplored dimension of the new housing issue is the insufficient supply of households with living space. After decades of continuous increase in living space per household and person in West Germany, and since the 1990s in East Germany as well, urban and especially tenant households have responded the price and rent inflation of the recent years with a significant decrease in demand for living space. This trend is also mirrored by increasing rates of overcrowding in European countries. In 2020, 10% of German households (and even 20% of young households) had less than one room per adult person available (overcrowding). The supply of living space and overcrowding are strongly income-dependent in society, with a Gini coefficient of about 20% in Germany, according to data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) (Kohl et al. 2019). Unequal consumption is not necessarily problematic per se but has a series of socially undesirable consequences, especially in the case of overcrowding. Our project focuses on families confronted with the trilemma of balancing family, school, and work regarding the housing issue. Existing literature shows a strong correlation of overcrowding with psychological stress, family instability, and low academic performance. This has become particularly visible during the COVID-19-induced shift to home office and homeschooling. Housing shortage thus has negative spillover effects on various aspects of life, which this project aims to explore for the first time using causal methodology and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Adequate housing supply is not only a central factor for the reproduction and allocation of labor but also an increasingly important aspect of the welfare state. In recent years, the housing issue has been repeatedly referred to as "the social question of our time."
The Triangle of German Democratic Capitalism - Growth, Housing and Voting
The interplay between democracy and capitalism in the German economic model is predominantly studied at the national level in comparison to other countries, ignoring the large regional variation. While economic historians have made important advances in studying Prussian counties or the “German lands” through regional or urban datasets before 1945, the study of the German political economy in regional perspective post-1945 has not been explored to a similar degree, not least due to a lack of regionally harmonized data. This interdisciplinary project on the regional Triangle of Democratic Capitalism – or REG-TDC – therefore proposes to establish within a first work package a harmonized county-level panel dataset tackling democratic capitalism from three angles: (i) economic growth in the form of GDP, industrial production and employment, and income distribution data, (ii) living standards and spatial social organization in the form of data on housing and house prices, and (iii) democratic politics in the form of a panel of regional electoral data. The outcome of this work package will be a database for common use in the scientific community, accompanied by a data documentation paper, as well as python code allowing future database extensions and flexible adjustment of regional units. REG-TDC then serves as an infrastructural stepping stone for advancing our understanding of democratic capitalism through regional variation in work packages 2 (growth, inequality, voting) and 3 (housing construction, prices and growth). More concretely, we will investigate how industrial change affected inequality and the German growth model, how the evolution of rents and house prices affected voting outcomes and housing construction as well as how the housing sector is associated with the German growth model. The project brings together the expertise of economic history, political economy, historical sociology, and economics in order to study core aspects of democratic capitalism from a regional historical perspective, using cutting-edge econometric methods.
Sociology of competition and the political economy of antitrust
Economic competition and growing concentration are core features of modern capitalism. The project investigates the rise of capitalist competition, its regulation in antitrust policies and its history of ideas. It aims at a better understanding of the much-discussed Great Atlantic Divide that opened up between the European and US-American understanding of competition. In one paper, we link antitrust regulation and varieties of capitalism. It further investigates antitrust and merger regulation in the European multi-level system. Finally, the project discussed the new dimensions of social inequalities that may result from recent trends of increasing economic concentration.