In this paper, we explore the long-run effects of cultural and imperial legacies in the Baltic region. Drawing evidence from the 1897 population census in the Russian Empire, we find that localities with a higher share of German historical population are inclined to be more developed in...

The Internet has devalued content to the point where it is often offered at no charge — newspapers, for instance — or widely misappropriated, as with music and movies. Either way, many people expect much of their content to be free. Why is this, how did it happen, and, focusing on music and...

Panel effects have been widely studied in randomly composed panels. However for many courts, panel composition stays constant. Then judges become familiar with each other. They know what to expect from each other. There is room for mutual trust. A local culture may emerge. If rejection is the...

The US Supreme Court has the power of certiorari. It may pick its fights. As a beneficial side effect, the court may allocate its resources, in particular the time and energy the justices spend on a case, to worthy causes. In economic parlance, this discretion makes the court more efficient....

The German Constitutional Court is radically different from the (mostly US) courts in which panel effects have been studied so widely. On the one hand, to a large extent, ideological and gender bias are neutralized by design. On the other hand, panels are not randomly composed. This makes it...

The US Supreme Court has the power of certiorari. It may pick its fights. As a beneficial side effect, the court may allocate its resources, in particular the time and energy the justices spend on a case, to worthy causes. In economic parlance, this discretion makes the court more efficient....

Two series of German bonds, issued in 1924 and 1930, traded on the London Stock Exchange throughout Hitler's 1933-1945 regime in Germany. We isolate both structural breaks and turning points in these bond series. Major turning points follow Hitler's reintroduction of conscription in 1935, the...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora from millions of digitized books for the USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. While existing measures go back at most to the 1970s, our measure goes back at least 200...

Will the spread of nuclear power to new states lead to the spread of nuclear weapons? I argue that the answer will depend on which states get nuclear power, which states acquire sensitive nuclear facilities (uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing) and the rules that govern technology...

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent...