German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the number of spies in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to...

We examine lobby influence on policy outcomes in a legislative vote-buying model with two competing lobbyists and endogenous policy proposals. We compare two polar cases: (1) the committee or (2) the lobbyist seeking policy change writes the bill. Surprisingly we find that if the salience of the...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

Why do some economic systems depend on bank financing while others rely on capital markets and bond financing? We propose a political economy model in which elites favor a bank-based system, which increases their rents due to reduced competition. If suffrage is restricted to the elite, this will...

Nowadays, a solid budget serves as an important quality signal for the electorate. Therefore, politicians might face an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts which are widely regarded as a key element for budget setups. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, we systematically...

We study whether the number of signatures collected to qualify a popular initiative affects the probability of reforming the status quo. The initiative process is modeled as a sequential game under uncertainty: petitioners make an entry decision and collect signatures to qualify the initiative....

This paper investigates the impact of urban protests on coup attempts in a sample of 39 SSA countries for the period 1990 to 2007. Widespread public discontent, especially when occurring in urban centers, can act as a trigger of coups in autocratic regimes by opening a window of opportunity for...