In this short note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the social democrats generally profit from higher voter turnout at the expense of the conservatives. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using...

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using data on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and socio-economic...

The Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides information about household wealth (real and financial assets as well as liabilities) from 15 Euro‐countries after the financial crisis of 2007/8. The survey will be the central dataset in this topic in the future. However, several...

A recent literature has used variation just around deterministic legislative population thresholds to identify the causal effects of institutional changes. This paper reviews the use of regression discontinuity designs using such population thresholds. Our concern involves three arguments: (1)...

Do incumbents in an election have an advantage, and if so, are these advantages heterogeneous across parties or government and opposition? We first present a theoretical discussion on the possible heterogeneity of incumbency effects in a pure two-party system. Then, we estimate the incumbency...

Remittances from Germany are substantial. Cross-border transfers to family and friendship networks outside Germany are not only made by foreigners. Many naturalized migrants send money home as well. Here, we focus on international networks and gender-specific determinants of remittances from the...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the party incumbency advantage in mayoral elections in Germany. Using a regression discontinuity design on a data set of about 25,000 elections, I estimate a causal incumbency effect of 38-40 percentage points in the probability of winning the next mayor...