In this paper, we estimate the effects of mandatory military service by exploiting the post-cold war decrease in the need for soldiers causing a substantial number of potential conscripts not to be drafted into the German military. Specifically, using previously unavailable information on degree...

We use the American Community Survey (ACS) to investigate the extent to which college major decisions were affected during and after the Great Recession with special attention to business and STEM fields, as well as the heterogeneity by gender, race/ethnicity and combinations of race/ethnicity...

Social distancing requirements associated with COVID-19 (coronavirus) have led to school closures. In mid-April, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization reported that 192 countries had closed all schools and universities, affecting more than 90 percent of the...

Elections define representative democracies, but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to electoral rooms. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic...

We use the separation and later reunification of Germany after World War II to show that a political regime shapes time preferences of its residents. Using two identification strategies, we find that former residents of the German Democratic Republic exhibit a significantly less pronounced...

We exploit an exogenous price increase by about 10% for architectural services to answer the question how price regulation affects income inequality and service quality. Using individual-level data from the German microcensus for the years 2006 to 2012, we find a significant reform effect of 8%...

We evaluate the effectiveness of placing microchips on the bags for the curbside collection in reducing the unsorted urban solid waste and increasing the fraction recycled. The microchip allows the waste collection company to identify the users that left the bags on the curb and check whether...

This paper evaluates if and to what extend the risk of becoming Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) has worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. The analysis is based on a unique dataset from the merging of two sample surveys, the Italian Labor Force Survey and the...

While it is well known that there are systematic birth order effects on life cycle outcomes, there is less consensus about underlying channels and mechanisms of birth order effects. We ftnd negative birth order effects among Chinese adolescents, favoring earlier-born children within household in...

This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on the quality of parent–child interactions and children's cognitive outcomes. My identification strategy exploits geographical differences in terms of exposure to the program, controlling for the period when the program is...