Stefanie Gäbler prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The study was completed in March 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of six distinct empirical essays...

China's urban geography has been dramatically altered over the past three decades. The co-presence of splinters in urban fabric - contrasting and continuously changing in terms of condition, use, and socio-cultural consistency - is symptomatic for the country's contemporary transition,...

This paper argues for a more systemic engagement with Latin American cities, contending it is necessary to reconsider their unity in order to nuance the 'fractured cities' perspective that has widely come to epitomise the contemporary urban moment in the region. It begins by offering an overview...

The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-20-commonly known as the Spanish flu- infected over a quarter of the world's population and killed over 50 million people. It is by far the greatest humanitarian disaster caused by infectious disease in modern history. Epidemiologists and health scientists...

We exploit the fact that disagreements in the German leadership after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 led to a quasi-exogenous division of Alsace and Lorraine to provide rare evidence of group identity formation within historically homogeneous regions. In line with the rejection-identification...

This article analyzes paths and patterns of partisan appointments among sector-categories in the executive branch of Brazil from 1986 to 2016. The analysis sought to understand nuances of partisan appointments for ministries in different periods taking into consideration different presidential...

This empirical study analyzes the cultural basis of the United States market response to imported Spanish products that seem to violate strongly-held cultural taboos. Survey responses were obtained from students in two contrasting majors, Art and Business, in two distinct cities and...

We study the interplay between scientific progress and culture through text analysis on a corpus of about eight million books, with the use of techniques and algorithms from machine learning. We focus on a specific scientific breakthrough, the theory of evolution through natural selection by...

How the Executive builds its own legislative agenda and which role does the Presidency play? This article partially answers the two questions and specifies how the formulation and the division of labor among its members - parties, bureaucracies, the Presidency and the President - are structured....

The quasi-exogenous division of the French regions Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War allows us to provide evidence about group identity formation within historically homogeneous regions. Using several measures of stated and revealed preferences spanning over half a century, we...