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...

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...

The role of electoral incentives vs. selection is ideally analyzed in a setting where the same legislators are selected to decide on policies under different electoral rules and where voter preferences on policies can be precisely measured. This is the first paper to look at such a situation....

How does competition affect the entry and selection of politicians? I use data on U.S. Congressional primary and general elections for the years 1998-2014 to study this question. I measure quality using previous legislative experience and the novel "identity match" quantifying how well...

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...

Why do people appear to forgo information by sorting into “echo chambers”? We construct a highly tractable multi-sender, multi-receiver cheap talk game in which players choose with whom to communicate. We show that segregation into small, homogeneous groups can improve everybody’s...

Local amenities are an important factor in the location choice of households. Heterogeneity in preferences of households tends to sort households over different locations which satisfy best their preferences given their constraints. In this paper, we analyze the effect of cultural heritage on...

The creative sector is one of the driving forces of total employment growth. Furthermore, economic studies suggest that the clustering of human capital might result in the polarization of economic development. Since the creative sector's de nition is motivated from the insights of the economics...

Recent research shows that urban heritage can be an important factor of residential location choice, and that especially highly educated households are attracted by the presence of cultural heritage. In this paper, we use a location choice model to investigate the attractiveness of neighborhood...