Why do some people go to the polling station, sometimes up to several times a year, while others always prefer to stay at home? This question has launched a wide theoretical debate in both economics and political science, but convincing empirical support for the different models proposed is...

We use a credible regression discontinuity design to estimate causal education effects. Pupils in the Swiss education system had to pass a centrally organized exam that classified them into different levels of secondary school, and that ultimately determined their educational degree. A major...

Refugees, and immigrants more generally, often do not have access to all jobs in the labor market. We argue that restrictions on employment opportunities help explain why immigrants have lower employment and wages than native citizens. To test this hypothesis, we leverage refugees' exogenous...

Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Scholars can choose from a range of methods that implement different RDD estimators, but there is a paucity of research on the performance of these different...

Why do some people go to the polling station, sometimes up to several times a year, while others always prefer to stay at home? This question has launched a wide theoretical debate in both economics and political science, but convincing empirical support for the different models proposed is...

Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland that were typically decided with referendums in each municipality. Using panel data from about $1,400$ municipalities for...

We use a credible regression discontinuity design to estimate causal education effects. Pupils in the Swiss education system had to pass a centrally organized exam that classified them into different levels of secondary school, and that ultimately determined their educational degree. A major...

We study the impact of naturalization on the long-term social integration of immigrants into the host country society. Despite ongoing debates about citizenship policy, we lack reliable evidence that isolates the causal effect of naturalization from the non-random selection into naturalization....