We study whether a democracy improves a measure of individual wellbeing; human heights. Drawing on individual-level datasets, we test the hypothesis using a battery of eight different measures of democracy and derived averages, and include models accounting for several confounders, regional and...

We compare inequality and social mobility trends in Eastern European countries exposed to Soviet Communist (SC) regimes with those not exposed, using similar welfare measures. We draw upon a rich retrospective dataset that collects relevant welfare measures across regimes including information...

What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust? To answer this question, we use the reunification of Germany as a natural experiment and study the post-reunification trajectory of convergence with regard to individuals' trust and risk, as well...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

We study the effect of exposure to communism (EC), a political-economic regime based on collectivist planning, on preferences for family supports, which we refer to as "informal family insurance". We exploit both cross-country and cohort variation in EC in a large sample of Central and Eastern...

This article links Russians' individual experiences during the late-Gorbachev and early-Yeltsin years to the beliefs those same individuals espoused in the Putin era, over a decade later. Drawing on questions, some of which are retrospective, from the first wave of the Life in Transition Survey,...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

This note provides extensive evidence on the persistence properties of real GDP in 17 European countries and in the US over the period 1960-2023 using a fractional integration framework. The analysis suggests that in all cases shocks have permanent effects on the level of real GDP. This is...

This study provides new panel evidence on the effects on climate risk on financial stability in the European banking sector using yearly data over the period 2000-2021. More specifically, the impact of a number of climate risk indices on the Z-score (capturing the probability of default of a...

We investigate the effect of anti-immigration attitudes on immigration plans to Europe. We propose a new instrument for attitudes toward immigration, namely, the number of country nationals killed in terrorist attacks taking place outside of Europe. Our first-stage results confirm that such...