The literature shows a wage premium for graduates from high quality, elite, or more selective universities. The results, however, exist for countries with a clear hierarchy of top universities, such as the US, England, and Australia. I evaluate if such an effect also exists in Germany, a country...

We isolate the direct bank-to-sovereign distress channel within the Eurozone’s sovereignbank-loop by exploiting the global, non-Eurozone related variation in stock prices. We instrument banking sector stock returns in the Eurozone with exposure-weighted stock market returns from non-Eurozone...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? To answer this question, we collect data for 173 countries between 1968 and 2014. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the global patterns of U.S. military aid, we provide causal estimates of U.S. military aid on anti-American terrorism. We...

This article presents an econometric analysis for the effects of fixed broadband penetration on the growth rate of GDP per capita for a panel of 35 developed and developing countries over an annual period of 33 years (1981 - 2013). The article contributes to the telecommunications literature by...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service: health, educational...

Empirical evidence about income convergence among regions and countries is inconclusive and it is necessary to clarify the economic and institutional conditions for convergence. We investigate movements in the income distribution among regions in an integrated market with high mobility of labor,...

We develop the case of two-stage least squares estimation (2SLS) in the general framework of Athey et al. (Generalized Random Forests, Annals of Statistics, Vol. 47, 2019) and provide a software implementation for R and C++. We use the method to revisit the classic application of instrumental...

Women are underrepresented in leadership positions - academia is no exception. Using data on careers of doctoral graduates in Germany, we study gender differences in the decision to stay at university as a postdoctoral researcher and in the intention to become a professor. We find that gender...

This article investigates women's returns to schooling by exploiting Burundi's free primary education policy (FPE) of 2005 as a natural experiment. Credibly exogenous variation in education is identified through a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD). Our results show that while...

Does the number of future anticipated children affect educational investment in parents-to-be? In theory, anticipated children can affect the returns to education, the resources available for family consumption, and the incentives for pre-marital investment. Changes in the eligibility criteria...