In the aftermath of elections or ballots, the legitimacy of the result is regularly debated if voter turnout was considered to be low. Hence, discussions about legal reforms to increase turnout are common in most democracies. We analyze the impact of a very small change in voting costs on voter...

We examine whether concerns about lenders' discrimination based on community racial characteristics can be empirically substantiated in the context of neighborhoods on and near American Indian reservations. Drawing on a large-scale dataset consisting of individual-level credit bureau records and...

We propose a theoretical explanation for the so-called “beauty premium”. Our approach relies entirely on search frictions and the fact that physical appearance plays an important role in attracting a marriage partner. We analyse the interaction between frictional labour and marriage markets,...

An empirical measure of trade openness is defined as the ratio of total trade to GDP, and represents a convenient variable routinely used for cross-country studies on a variety of issues. However, the effects that the crude measure captures remain ambiguous, making it difficult to interpret the...

To assess whether earnings-dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between high educated (high earning) and low educated (low earning) women, I exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in Germany that considerably increases the financial incentives...

Norwegian parents of preschool children make their care choices from a completely different choice set compared to what their predecessor did, say, two decades ago. Now, there is essentially only one type of nonparental care, center-based care, and at the parental side fathers take a more...

The large regional variation in minimum wage levels in the period 2002-08 in China implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from...

We exploit two unusual policy features of academic high schools in Seoul, South Korea—random assignment of pupils to high schools within districts and conversion of some existing single-sex schools to the coeducational (coed) type over time—to identify three distinct causal parameters: the...

This paper investigates the degree of persistence of market fear. Specifically, two different long-memory approaches (R/S analysis with the Hurst exponent method and fractional integration) are used to analyse persistence of the VIX index over the sample period 2004-2016, as well as some...

This article investigates the macro-level drivers of adult-age language learning. We construct a new dataset that covers German language learning in 77 countries (including Germany) for 1992-2006. Fixed-effects regressions show that language learning in the EU is strongly associated with...