Using historical data for all Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. The main innovation in this paper is that we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity and instrumental variables to address the potential...

This paper documents and analyzes changes in relative wages of older East Germans after unification. In 1990, employees above 45 started out with very low wages relative to younger East Germans or West Germans in the same cohort. Results suggest that older employees lost up to 30 percent of...

The paper analyzes the effects of tighter border control on the illegal crossing market between Mexico and the United States. Combining panel data on illegal migrants with enforcement statistics, the effects of enforcement are found to be moderate: prices of border smugglers ('coyotes')...

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies, for example, report contradictory effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality - ranging from zero to large mortality reductions. Using data from 19 compulsory...

Previous studies report a wide range of estimates for how female labor supply responds to childcare prices. We shed new light on this question using a reform that raised the prices of public daycare. Parents respond by reducing public daycare and increasing childcare at home. Parents also reduce...

This article studies how portable skills accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital to measure empirically the transferability of skills across occupations. Our results on occupational mobility and...

This article uses unique voting data on 331 federal propositions to estimate voter preferences in Swiss cantons. We document that preferences vary systematically with cantonal characteristics. In particular, cantons whose voters are more conservative, less in favor of redistribution and less...

Das Bundeskabinett hat einen Gesetzentwurf zur Modernisierung des Staatsangehörigkeitsrechts beschlossen. Dadurch kann sich der Bildungserfolg von Kindern mit Migrationshintergrund verbessern. Denn: Wenn Kinder mit Migrationshintergrund einen deutschen Pass erhalten, müssen sie seltener eine...