States merge small and medium sized municipalities to achieve economies of scale. Little is known to which extent mergers of large local governments reduce expenditures. I use the synthetic control method to identify the effect of mergers of county-sized administrations in Germany (districts) on...

I present the first database of historical local population figures for all Germany. The German Local Population Database (GPOP) includes total population in 1871, 1910, 1939, 1946, 1961, 1987, 1996, 2011, and 2019 for the universe of all German municipalities, counties, and states at consistent...

In many federal countries, local governments run large deficits, even when fiscal supervision by state authorities is tight. I investigate to which extent party alignment of governments and fiscal supervisors influences budget deficits. The dataset includes 427 German local governments for the...

Left-hand drive (LHD) vehicles share higher road accident risks under left-hand traffic because of blind spot areas. Due to low import prices, the number of wrong-hand drive vehicles skyrockets in emerging countries like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. I identify the causal effect of wrong-hand...

States merge local governments to achieve economies of scale. Little is known to which extent mergers of county-sized local governments reduce expenditures, and influence political outcomes. I use the synthetic control method to identify the effect of mergers of large local governments in...

We show that migrating extremists shape political landscapes toward their ideology in the long run. We exploit the unexpected division of the state of Upper Austria into a US and a Soviet occupation zone after WWII. Zoning prompts large-scale Nazi migration to US occupied regions. Regions that...

Der medizinisch-technische Fortschritt (MTF) gilt als wesentlicher Treiber der Gesundheitsausgaben und Hauptursache düsterer Beitragssatzprognosen für die Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung (GKV). Übersehen wird hierbei zumeist, dass der MTF zugleich Produktivitätszuwächse im Gesundheitswesen...

Voter turnout has declined in many industrialized countries, raising the question of whether electoral institutions increase voter turnout. We exploit an electoral reform in the Austrian state of Burgenland as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of opening hours of polling...

Total factor productivity (TFP) growth allows for additional health care services under restricted resources. We examine whether hospital policy can stimulate hospital TFP growth. We exploit variation across German federal states in the period 1993 to 2013. State governments decide on hospital...

Do citizens legislate different tax policies than parliaments? We provide quasi-experimental evidence for causal effects of direct democracy. Town meetings (popular assemblies) replace local councils in small German municipalities below a specific population threshold. Difference-in-differences,...