I present the first database of historical local population figures for all Germany. The German Local Population Database (GPOP) includes total population in 1871, 1910, 1939, 1946, 1961, 1987, 1996, 2011, and 2019 for the universe of all German municipalities, counties, and states at consistent...

Can public infrastructure help regions to mitigate large shocks? We examine how hospital infrastructure contributes to regional resilience in the event of serious health emergencies. During the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, four out of every 1,000 Germans died. We find lower influenza mortality...

Voter turnout has declined in many industrialized countries, raising the question of whether electoral institutions increase voter turnout. We exploit an electoral reform in the Austrian state of Burgenland as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of opening hours of polling...

We show that migrating extremists shape political landscapes toward their ideology in the long run. We exploit the unexpected division of the state of Upper Austria into a US and a Soviet occupation zone after WWII. Zoning prompts large-scale Nazi migration to US occupied regions. Regions that...

We examine whether compulsory voting influences habit-formation in voting. In Austria, some states temporarily introduced compulsory voting in national elections. We exploit border municipalities across two states that differ in compulsory voting legislation using a difference-in-differences and...

We examine the extent to which political scandals influence trust in electoral institutions in established Western democracies. The second ballot of the 2016 Presidential election in Austria needed to be repeated because of inconsistencies in individual electoral districts (scandal districts)....

Party performance in state and federal elections is highly interdependent. Federal elections impact regional voting dynamics and vice versa (electoral externalities). We quantify the extent of simultaneous electoral externalities between two layers of government. We apply vector autoregressions...

Do citizens legislate different tax policies than parliaments? We provide quasi-experimental evidence for causal effects of direct democracy. Town meetings (popular assemblies) replace local councils in small German municipalities below a specific population threshold. Difference-in-differences,...

We examine how populist governments influence political culture and economic outcomes. Some Austrian communities are governed by far-right populist mayors, directly elected by a majority of voters. We exploit close elections and find that the electorate becomes more polarized under populist...

How do staying minorities that evade ethnic cleansing integrate into re-settled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning anti-fascists. We study quasi-experimental...