Can autocracies win electoral support by showcasing economic competence? We analyze a famous case – the building of the Autobahn network in Nazi Germany. Using newly collected data, we show that highway construction was effective in boosting popular support, helping to entrench the Nazi...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to the literature exploring the “dark side” of social capital, examining the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We collect new data on the density of associations in 229 German...

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized U.S. science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the U.S. we compare changes in patenting by U.S. inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting...

We study the link between fiscal austerity and Nazi electoral success. Voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities for four elections between 1930 and 1933 shows that areas more affected by austerity (spending cuts and tax increases) had relatively higher vote shares for the Nazi...

Using novel microdata, we document an unintended, first-order consequence of the Protestant Reformation: a massive reallocation of resources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual framework in which the introduction of religious competition shifts...

What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally...

We show that, in a model without commitment to future policies, geoengineering breakthroughs can have adverse environmental and welfare effects because they change the (equilibrium) carbon taxes. In our model, energy producers emit carbon, which creates a negative environmental externality, and...

Given the rapid growth in health care spending that is often attributed to technological change, many private and public institutions are grappling with how to best assess and adopt new health care technologies. The leading technology adoption criteria proposed in theory and used in practice...

We summarize a framework for the study of the implications of automation and AI on the demand for labor, wages, and employment. Our task-based framework emphasizes the displacement effect that automation creates as machines and AI replace labor in tasks that it used to perform. This displacement...

This paper explores some costs associated with environmental regulation. We focus on regulation pertaining to ground-level ozone (O3) and its effects on two manufacturing industries -- industrial organic chemicals (SIC 2865-9) and miscellaneous plastic products (SIC 308). Both are major emitters...