This paper studies the long-term impact of societal socialization on values using the example of doping behavior in sports. We apply the German Reunification Approach to the microcosm of Berlin and exploit its 40-year long division into a capitalist and a communist sector. We deliberately chose...

Recent years have witnessed a rise in right-wing extremism among German youth and young adults. This paper investigates the extent to which the experience of parental unemployment during childhood affects young people's far right-wing attitudes and xenophobia. Estimates from three different...

Survivor testimonies link survival in deadly POW camps, Gulags, and Nazi concentration camps to the formation of close friendships with other prisoners. We provide statistical evidence consistent with these fundamentally selective testimonies. We study the survival of the 140 thousand Jews who...

Can weakened religiosity lead to the rise of totalitarianism? The Nazi Party set itself up as a political religion, emphasizing redemption, sacrifice, rituals, and communal spirit. This had a major impact on its success: Where the Christian Church only had shallow roots, the Nazis received...

A substantial body of research suggests that economists are less generous than other professionals and that economics students are less generous than other students. We address this question using administrative data on donations to social programs by students at the University of Washington....

The existing literature on the determinants of terrorism treats terror as a uniform phenomenon and does not distinguish between different types of terror. This paper explicitly addresses the heterogeneity of terror by classifying groups according to their ideologies. We show that the pattern of...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

This paper presents a new model of interest groups and policy formation in the legislature. In our setting, the already given party ideological predispositions and power distribution determine the expected policy outcome. Our analysis applies to the case of un-enforced or enforced party...

Previous research has established that good-looking political candidates win more votes. We extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum. Our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey...

When policymakers and private agents use models, the economists who design the model have an incentive to alter it in order to influence outcomes in a fashion consistent with their own preferences. I discuss some consequences of the existence of such ideological bias. In particular, I analyze...