Social media are becoming increasingly important in our society and change the way people communicate, how they acquire information, and how they form beliefs. Experts are concerned that the rise of social media may make interaction and information exchange among like-minded individuals more...

In this paper, we analyze the growth effects of historical and biological ancestry, diversity and financial development in transition economies. We show that the common indicators of ethnolinguistic fractionalization, state history and genetic distance yield significant results and to some...

Does the politico-economic system affect preferences for immigration? In this study, I show that individuals exposed to life under state socialism have formed and persistently hold different attitudes toward immigration. By exploiting the division and reunification of Germany, I estimate the...

Cross-country differences in homeownership rates are large and persistent over time, with homeownership rates ranging from 40% in Switzerland to 80% in Spain. This paper investigates whether culture is a driving factor of the homeownership decision, and could thus explain part of the...

Patience and risk-taking - two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making - are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find...

This paper investigates the long-term effects of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) on intimate partner violence. The identification of these causal effects relies on a novel historical dataset from which I exploit the distance from municipalities to military camps during the war. Over 130 years...

This paper studies the effects of local threat on cultural and economic assimilation of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We combine novel survey data on cultural preferences and economic outcomes of refugees with...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people’s time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data...

As social media becomes prominent within academia, we examine its reputational costs for academics. Analyzing Twitter posts from 98,000 scientists (2016-22), we uncover substantial political expression. Online experiments with 4,000 U.S. respondents and 135 journalists, rating synthetic academic...

I investigate the effect of open source on standardization outcomes in a market with positive network externalities. In a closed source world, it seems reasonable to assume that the probability of a standard being chosen is positively correlated with its quality. Open source may weaken or invert...