Using data from the US commodity flow surveys, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between US states by about 16 percentrelative to trade flows within the former alliances. Amongst one million placebos, thereis no other constellation of state...

Spätestens seit dem letztjährigen Auftritt von Conchita Wurst mit ihrem provokanten Mix aus männlichen und weiblichen Zügen hat der Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in ganz Europa Aufmerksamkeit erregt. Neben der großen öffentlichen Teilnahme existieren aber auch eine ganze Reihe...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to a growing literature on its "dark side". We examine the role of social capital in the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We analyze Nazi Party entry in a cross-section of cities,...

This paper analyses the connection between legal origins and generalized trust. Based on recent results of institutions and trust research it argues that legal origins and trust are connected via the beliefs of agents. Next, it develops hypotheses about a complex and self-reinforcing causal...

I examine empirically the role of historical political centralization on the likelihood of modern civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. I combine a wide variety of historical sources to construct an original measure of long-run exposure to statehood at the sub-national level. I then exploit...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper connects a growing literature on the “dark side” of social capital with institutional change. We examine the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. Using new data on Nazi Party entry in a...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to a growing literature on its "dark side". We examine the role of social capital in the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We analyze Nazi Party entry in a cross-section of cities,...

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was one of the most devastating conflicts of the twentieth century, yet little is known about its long-term legacy. We show that the war had a long-lasting effect on social capital, voting behavior and collective memory. To this end we use geo-located data on...

Kinship ties are a common institution that may facilitate in-group coordination and cooperation. Yet their benefits - or lack thereof - depend crucially on the broader institutional environment. We study how the prevalence of clan ties affect how communities confronted two well-studied...

In this paper, we analyze the long-run effects of Western and Japanese imperial expansion on the survival of Confucian values in China and Taiwan. Mainland China and Taiwan had been under the rule of the Qing dynasty and shared the same culture and societal structure before the onset of imperial...