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...

After more than one decade of sustained economic growth, accompanied by falling poverty and inequality, Brazil has been hit by an economic recession starting in 2014. This paper investigates the consequences of this labor market shock for the victory of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018...

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...

Our research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that a higher incidence of solar eclipses is associated with higher social complexity and complex thinking in premodern societies. We construct a novel dataset of solar eclipses' incidence at the ethnic-group level, bringing...