This paper quantifies how much of violent crime in society can be attributed to football-related violence. We study the universe of professional football matches played out in Germany's top three football leagues over the period 2011-2015. To identify causal effects, we leverage time-series and...

Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of "university" and inadequate organizational forms for modern...

Research on happiness has produced valuable insights into the sources of subjective well-being. A major finding from this literature is that people exhibit a "baseline" happiness that shows persistent strength over time, and twin studies have shown that genes play a significant role in...

The structural stability of different languages subject to the import of external elements is analyzed. We focus on the temporal side of the different processes interacting to produce a change in the structure of the language. That is, the rate of import and dissipation of new elements is seen...

The German government provides discretionary investment grants to structurally weak regions to reduce regional disparities. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits an exogenous discrete jump in the probability of receiving investment grants, to identify the causal effects of the...

The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning, two of which affect the broad decision to learn, while two concern as well the choice...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce...

This paper studies the role of culture in shaping unemployment outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on local comparisons across a language barrier in Switzerland. This Röstigraben separates cultural groups, but neither labor markets nor political jurisdictions. Local contrasts across the...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...

This paper studies the transmission mechanism from family culture to economic institutions, by analyzing the impact of the within family organization on the original design of the public pension systems. We build a simple OLG model with families featuring either weak or strong internal ties....