Why do public policies change little over time in individual places, sometimes for centuries? We investigate different mechanisms for policy persistence. Several city mayors serving in democratic Weimar Germany were expelled by the Nazis in 1933, but re-installed by the Allies after World War...

We revisit the natural experiments of division and unification of Germany now that more time has passed and more data have become available. We show that local market access shocks are not symmetric in time. The negative shock to local market access following the division of Germany lead to a...

This paper presents evidence of political legacies of exposure to a violent class conflict over 100 years. We revisit the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and first trace out the impact of local conflict exposure on electoral outcomes over a quarter-century period between the World Wars. The electoral...

We exploit a historical experiment that occurred in Czechoslovakia after World War Two to study the drivers of social capital accumulation in an extremely unfavorable environment. Between 1945 and 1948, the Sudetenland became the scene of ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of nearly three...

This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

This paper examines the economic impact of Ireland's partition, assessing market access losses using detailed geospatial data and multimodal transport network analysis. The study reveals that partition significantly reduced market access on both sides of the border, contributing to population...

This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

Tourism is an extremely complex phenomenon marked by major factors like the terrorist attacks and the refugees' invasion (the recent waves of migrants). This paper tests by empirical analyses if in the European Union countries, the gross domestic product in tourism reacts to the situations of...

Public housing policy has given housing cooperatives above-average market shares, in some cases. This was achieved despite the fact that the sponsor, believing that he was doing good, even temporarily slowed down the independent development of his target. The case study of Hochtaunusbau shows...

One of the Wehrmacht's main goals in the Caucasus were the oil fields. A special unit for the Caucasus operation was the "Technische Brigade Mineralöl" (Mineral Oil Technical Brigade). The large volume of surviving files from the TBM allows us to glean new insights into the German prisoner of...