This paper studies empirically the effect of education policies on human capital and per capita income. The results suggest for European and OECD countries that higher attendance at pre-primary education, greater autonomy of schools and universities, a lower student-to-teacher ratio, higher age...

I examine a policy-making game among countries that must choose both a policy instrument (e.g., a tax or a quota) and its intensity (i.e., the tax rate or the quota level) to price pollution. When countries price pollution non-cooperatively, they not only set the intensity inefficiently, they...

Does the composition of governance affect firm outcomes? We exploit the timings and thresholds of a gender quota in boards of directors and supervisory boards to causally determine the impact of a change in leadership on performance. Using a novel design and data on boards, we find that firms...

We provide evidence that political instability deteriorates economic growth. We establish this result based on panel difference-in-differences strategies and dynamic panel data models using a large sample of 180 countries, a novel geocoded dataset for 2,660 regions, and micro data for about...

Political connections between firms and autocratic regimes are not secret and often even publicly displayed in many developing economies. We argue that tying a firm's available rent to a regime's survival acts as a credible commitment forcing entrepreneurs to support the government and to exert...

In the seminal rational inattention model of Matĕjka and McKay (2015), logit demand arises from the discrete choice of agents who are uncertain about choice payoffs and who have access to a flexible, costly information acquisition technology (RI-logit). A notable limitation of this powerful...

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals’ preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

In 2011, German police accidentally stumbled upon a previously unknown right-wing extremist group called the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Further investigations implicated the group in previously unexplained murders of mostly ethnically Turkish individuals and in other crimes targeting...