Expectations play a central role in financial markets, yet investors often disagree about the economy’s future. Such disagreement has long been regarded as a potential driver of asset prices, but it remains uncertain whether it reflects mispricing or a priced source of risk. This study addresses the issue by constructing monthly disagreement indices from Consensus Economics forecasts across 24 OECD markets. Firm-level exposure to economic disagreement is estimated using return regressions. The results reveal pronounced cross-country heterogeneity. In developed markets, particularly the United States, greater exposure to disagreement consistently predicts lower future returns, supporting the mispricing hypothesis. In smaller markets, the evidence is mixed, with some cases indicating positive risk premia and others showing no significant effect. Overall, the findings provide new international evidence that the pricing of forecast disagreement is context-dependent, shaped by market structure and institutional depth.

From Gene to Ecosystem – Retrospective molecular biodiversity monitoring of plant-associated arthropod communities and abiotic stress on plants

Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht das Motiv der Freiheit als zentrales Thema in Werken des DDR-Autors Ulrich Plenzdorf. Ziel ist es, Plenzdorfs literarische Auseinandersetzung mit individuellen Freiheitsbestrebungen unter den Bedingungen der SED-Diktatur eingehend zu erschließen. Die Analyse erfolgt diachron und umfasst Texte aus den 1960er Jahren bis zum Ende der 1980er Jahre, wodurch Entwicklungslinien, thematische Verschiebungen und ästhetische Veränderungen im Werk sichtbar werden. Neben kanonisierten Werken werden auch bislang wenig beachtete Texte einbezogen, um ein vollständigeres Bild von Plenzdorfs literarischer Produktion zu gewinnen und Forschungslücken zu schließen. Methodisch orientiert sich die Studie an einem kulturwissenschaftlichen Ansatz im Sinne des New Historicism, der literarische Texte als Teil kultureller Praktiken und sozialer Machtverhältnisse versteht. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird gezeigt, wie Plenzdorf Freiheitsvorstellungen in unterschiedlichen historischen Phasen der DDR artikuliert und mit Alltagskultur, Subkulturen sowie gesellschaftlichen Konfliktfeldern verknüpft. Diese Dissertation leistet damit einerseits einen Beitrag zur Neubewertung Plenzdorfs und andererseits zur kulturhistorischen Kontextualisierung der DDR-Literatur.

Transnational protest movements continue to expose the enduring legacies of colonial exploitation and institutionalised racism within and beyond European cities. They foreground the systemic conditions under which Black lives are rendered disproportionately vulnerable to premature death. In doing so, they expose the enduring entanglements of racial capitalism, state violence and spatial exclusion. Through their ongoing political agitation these movements highlight the need for spatio-temporally situated and relationally embedded engagements with Black urban lives. My thesis responds to that call by examining place-making practices of enclosure and refusal throughout Black London’s post-World War II development. Grounded in the ethnographic narrative of “being halfway while shooting”, I explore how Black lives are enclosed by institutional racism, how this enclosure is spatialised and how Black and differently racialised Londoners refuse these spatial enclosures through everyday and collective place-making practices. At the intersection of structural constraint and the desire to enact Black freedom in London, I specifically foreground the emergence of fugitive place-making practices. Conceptually, I bring (critical) urban geography scholarship, Black studies and Black (British)Geographies scholarship into conversation. I develop “being halfway while shooting” as a relational concept that foregrounds the production of racialised urban knowledges, the multiplicity of Black enclosures, and the plurality of place-based strategies committed to refusal. I do so by stressing the relevance of Black fugitive thinking to account for the ongoing refusals that mark the relationship between Blackness and the British city. Methodologically, I adopt a research-activist ethnographic approach, grounded in my long-term engagement with a housing campaign in East London that organises around the housing needs of London’s racialised and gendered urban poor. Using qualitative methods - archival research, interviews, (non-)participant observations, document and media analysis - I embed contemporary struggles into long and ongoing histories of racial-capitalist urban development as well as Black and multi-ethnic refusal. The empirical chapters trace place-making practices of enclosure and refusal across London’s post-World War II urban development. By examining the aftermath of urban revolts and changing urban welfare regimes, I explore how racialised urban governance has been historically materialised in and through the city. At the same time, I foreground how within this racialised construction of the British city, Black and differently racialised Londoners continue to hold open the possibility of refusal through places in which communal care and self-determination can be enacted. I then turn to the struggle over housing in East London, showing how contemporary processes of racialised dehumanisation and ongoing displacement are both historically rooted and actively contested. In the final empirical chapter I accentuate the relevance of these findings for German-speaking critical urban geography debates. The research shows that racial capitalist urbanism reproduces enclosures through practices of value extraction, spatial displacement, and the policing of Black subjectivities. In response, Black and differently racialised Londoners engage in fugitive place-making. Rooted in communal care, political organisation, collective education and cultural affirmation, these practices reassert Black presence and belonging. They offer an enduring mode of place-based refusal and the ongoing possibility to stay in the city differently. These findings not only demonstrate the academic significance of my research but also underscore the urgent need to support the place-making practices of Black and differently racialised urban communities, who continue to refuse the racialised enclosure of the British city from within. From these empirical insights, I propose the concept of a fugitive sense of place - a theoretical lens that accounts for the racialised reproduction of urban space and the transformative place-making practices of those who refuse its logics. Rather than offering prescriptive policy recommendations, I call for a reorientation of urban geographical enquiry by centring Black spatial practices, knowledges and imaginations. Through the lens of “being halfway while shooting”, I argue for a rethinking of human habitation and urban theory through the lived experiences of Black survival and refusal. Attending to a fugitive sense of place, I propose new avenues for human geography research to explore how fugitive place-making practices reshape the meanings, conditions, and possibilities of urban life.

Many developed countries, including Germany, face a steady rise in the share of individuals obtaining higher education. While rising education itself bears a series of advantages as extensively studied in previous literature, it is also conceptually linked to a higher likelihood of working in an occupation that does not match one’s normal qualifications. Previous studies have predominantly evaluated how demographic or job‐related aspects correlate with the likelihood of being educationally ﴾mis﴿matched. However, they have largely ignored institutional facets of the educational system or industrial organization. Moreover, little is known about how private wealth affects educational mismatch or whether job satisfaction is homogenously affected among individuals once such a mismatch occurs. The five projects collected in this thesis aim to answer these open questions in the literature for Germany, using data from the Socio‐Economic Panel and employing different time intervals between 1984 and 2022. Beginning with the educational system in early childhood, Chapter 2 evaluates the impact of school‐starting age on the likelihood of over‐ and undereducation. It exploits the exogenous variation in school‐entry rules across federal states and years in Germany with regression discontinuity designs. The results report a negative impact of school‐starting age on the likelihood of undereducation, but no systematic relationship with overeducation. Subsequently, Chapter 3 explores the variation in education costs by leveraging the quasi‐experimental setting induced by the time‐limited introduction of tuition fees in several German federal states between 2006 and 2014. The increase in education costs among treated graduates results in a significantly higher likelihood of overeducation, which endures even several years post‐graduation. Chapter 4 focuses on the industrial relations system and examines the correlation between trade union membership and the likelihood and extent of educational ﴾mis﴿match. The results reveal that trade union members report significantly less overeducation at both the intensive and extensive margin and also a higher likelihood of being matched compared to non‐members. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analysis provides evidence that this correlation is driven by improved bargaining power instead of informational advantages. Chapter 5 focuses on private wealth as a determinant of educational mismatch by investigating the impact of a wealth shock through inheritances, lottery winnings or gifts on the likelihood of over‐ and undereducation. Due to the diminishing marginal returns of wages with increasing windfall gains the likelihood of undereducation is expected to decrease, while that of overeducation is expected to increase. Empirically, these suppositions are supported for overeducation, as its likelihood increases significantly after the windfall gain. Further analyses reveal that this effect is driven by individuals switching occupations while increasing their leisure time, and it materializes only for medium to large windfall gains. Contrary to the previous chapters, Chapter 6 focuses on educational mismatch, more precisely on overeducation, as the independent variable. In particular, it investigates the correlation between overeducation and job satisfaction. The results align with the previously established negative correlation for private sector employees exclusively. In contrast, interaction and subsample analyses reveal a positive correlation for public sector employees. This link is driven by individuals with a high degree of altruistic motivation and family orientation.