To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

Voters dealing with jurisdictional merger decisions face a trade-off between economies of scale and preference costs. Larger jurisdictions may offer cost advantages, yet the downside is that policies in larger units may be less aligned to voter preferences. Our study is the first to provide...

Multi-agency financial stability committees (FSCs) have grown dramatically since the global financial crisis. However, most cannot direct actions or recommend to other agencies that they take actions, and most would influence policy actions only through convening and discussing risks. We...

We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which they support health infrastructure projects. Using exogenous variation in soil texture, we...

We design and implement an iterative, program-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism with ties (IDAT) and apply it to childcare assignment in two German cities. The mechanism can accommodate complementarities in providers' preferences, is fast to terminate even in larger cities, is difficult to...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. Projects may differ in their value for the designer, and their cost is private information. In this allocation problem, the quantity of procured projects is endogenously determined...

In this paper, we study the extent to which ministers engage in regional favoritism. We are the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of a larger set of the governing elite, not just focusing on the primary leader. We hand-collect birthplaces of this governing elite globally. Combining this...

We study the causal relationship between moral values ("ought" statements) and factual beliefs ("is" statements) and show that, contrary to predictions of orthodox Bayesian models, values exert an influence on beliefs. This effect is mediated by prior political leanings and, thus, contributes to...

How did the large asylum-seeker inflow to Germany in 2015 affect concerns about immigration? Using individual-level panel data for the years 2012–2018, I show that after 2015 concerns about immigration increased by about 21 pp. and support for extreme right-wing parties by about 1.7 pp. These...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...