Woman suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Yet, women neither won the right to vote by force, nor did men grant it under the imminent threat of female unrest. These facts are difficult to reconcile with leading political economy theories of suffrage extensions. In...

The flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe during and after World War II constitutes one of the largest forced population movements in history. We analyze the economic integration of these forced migrants and their offspring in West Germany. The empirical results suggest that even a...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

The Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan in March 2011 caused a fundamental change in Germany's energy policy which led to the immediate shut down of nearly half of its nuclear power plants. This paper uses data from Germany's largest internet platform for real estate to investigate the effect of...

Eastern Germany's recovery from the unification shockʺ has been characterized by deep structural change with apparent repercussions for the West as well and an integration process involving both capital deepening (extensive and intensive investment) and labor thinning (net out-migration). I...