We exploit a unique historical setting to investigate how refugee-specific government aid affects the medium-term outcomes of refugees who migrate as children and young adults. German Democratic Republic (GDR) refugees who escaped to West Germany between 1946 and 1961 who were acknowledged to be...

We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and administrative features of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person's actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...