International carbon markets are frequently propagated as an efficient instrument for reducing CO2 emissions. We argue that such markets, despite their desirable efficiency properties, might not be in the best interest of governments who are guided by strategic considerations in negotiations. We...

Competing definitions of justice in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics indicate the existence of two distinct economic systems with different normative priorities. The three-class society of the Platonic economy (guardians, auxiliaries, producers) gives rise to guardians who by virtue are...

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, 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....

Do sanctions strengthen the targeted regime? I analyze the 2014 imposition of Western sanctions on Russia and its impact on voting. The US and the EU introduced targeted measures against Russian entities and individuals related to Putin's regime. Using polling station-level data I investigate...

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...

The COVID-19 pandemic increased pressure on the relationship between governments and the public, making cooperation between both actors more critical than ever. Surprisingly, there is significant variation in public compliance with health policies, especially regarding vaccine uptake across...

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...