The nexus between corruption and economic growth has been examined for a long time. Many empirical studies measured corruption by the reversed Transparency International’s Perception of Corruption Index (CPI) and ignored that the CPI was not comparable over time. The CPI is comparable over...

How globalisation influences social expenditure has been examined for industrialized countries. Globalisation has often been shown to be positively associated with social expenditure in established industrialized countries, a finding that corroborates the compensation hypothesis. Scholars have...

I study the economic consequences of the Red Army's misdeeds after WWII. I exploit differences in spatial economic activity across the arbitrarily drawn and only for 74 days lasting liberation demarcation line between the Red Army and the Western Allies in South Austria. Dismantling and...

Using a new instrumental variable strategy, we examine whether bilateral development aid increases military expenditure in recipient countries. The instrument is the interaction of donor government fractionalization and the probability of receiving aid. The dataset includes new data on military...

Decarbonization requires the transformation of power markets towards renewable energies and investment costs are decisive for the deployed technologies. Exogenous cost assumptions cannot fully reflect the underlying dynamics of technological change. We implement divergent learning-by-doing...

Technological change has fundamentally transformed the US labour market in recent decades, with high-earning jobs becoming increasingly focused on nonroutine, complex tasks. We provide a first experimental test of whether fairness perceptions and preferences for redistribution differ when top...

We consider an economy in which competitive firms use three technologies for electricity production: pollutive fossils, intermittent renewables whose availability varies continuously over time, and storage. A Pigouvian tax implements the first-best solution. This is also the case for an...

This paper investigates whether social media access is associated with increased probability or intensity of ethnic conflict in Myanmar. In this context most people use mobile phones, and particularly the Facebook app, to access the internet. To distinguish the effects of social media from those...