Drawing on panel data from six elections between 1998 and 2017 in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of immigration - described by Germany's interior minister as the "mother of all political problems" - on electoral support for the far right and the far left. Our identification strategy is...

What factors lead underrepresented groups to gain more political representation? I digitize a novel source of data that contains records of Hispanics elected to public office from the local to the federal level from 1984 to 1994 and exploit variation in legal status arising from the 1986...

Immigration has become one of the most divisive political issues in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and several other Western countries. We estimate the impact of immigration on voting for far-left and far-right candidates in France, using panel data on presidential elections from...

The massive increase in the number of arriving refugees in Europe in 2015 creates enormous economic and political challenges in the receiving countries. An important concern is that the inflow of refugees increases the support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. This paper...

Most German states have reformed university preparatory schooling by reducing duration from 13 to 12 years with unchanged graduation requirements. The reform was implemented in the states during the last decade in several consecutive years. In this paper, we use nationwide data on high school...

This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for first-time mothers on welfare. A major goal of the program is to increase the participants economic self-sufficiency. I use administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency and...

Can moving to an earnings-related parental leave system influence children s well-being and are heterogeneous effects on parents carried over to the entire family, making special groups of children worse off than others? To answer this question, this study exploits a large and unanticipated...

Many governments have introduced generous childcare subsidies to allow all children access to early childhood education. The effects of these costly programs are however still debated. In this paper, we use the introduction of free public childcare in several states in Germany to analyze its...