This paper studies individual truth-telling behavior in the presence of multiple lying opportunities with heterogeneous stake sizes. The results show that individuals lie downwards (i.e. forgo money due to their lie) in low-stakes situations in order to signal honesty, and thereby mitigate the...

Resource-rich dictatorships are more inclined to repress civil society than others. In this paper, we identify a tradeoff between political rents from natural resources and the organizational density of civil society. This organizational density determines the extent to which citizens can...

How does a negative labor demand shock impact fertility? I analyze this question in the context of the East German fertility decline after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I exploit differential pressure for restructuring across East German industries which led to unexpected, exogenous, and...

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...

In this paper, I test the effects of religious norms on the provision of public goods. My evidence is drawn from public goods experiments that I ran with regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. I introduce three treatments, which I define as degrees of Eastern Orthodox...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of religious identity - defined both as personal identification with a religious tradition and institutional ideas on the provision of public goods - on attitudes toward central government. We explore whether citizens belonging to collectivist rather than...

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing...

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as a stochastically set demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards....

Considerable evidence has documented that the elderly are more religious and that religiousness is associated with better health and lower mortality. Yet, little is known about the reverse role of life expectancy or proximity to death, as opposed to age, for religiousness. This paper provides...

We revisit Max Weber's hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber's Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late 19th century Prussia we reject Weber's suggestion that Protestantism mattered...