Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia’s 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994 (the “Russian Mortality Crisis”). Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol-related causes and among working-age men (the heaviest drinkers), this paper...

Using a new data set from 1890 to 2000, we estimate how the adoption of proportional representation affects policies in Swiss cantons. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare bene fits) but decrease spending on targetable goods (e.g. roads...

We study how the presence of a college affects the local economy using administrative data. Our analysis exploits the opening of new institutions of tertiary education across Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. The new college substantially increased the student population and share of high-skilled...

We study how the presence of a college affects the local economy using administrative data. Our analysis exploits the opening of new institutions of tertiary education across Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. The new college substantially increased the student population and share of high-skilled...

We analyze the evolution of the wage structure in East Germany over the past two decades and compare it to West Germany. Both regions experienced a rise in wage inequality between 1995and 2009 with wage dispersion in East Germany exceeding West Germany, esp. at the top. We also show that wage...

Previous studies report a range of estimates for the response of female labor supply and childcare attendance to childcare prices. We shed new light on these questions using a policy reform that raises the price of public daycare. After the reform, children are 8 percentage points less likely to...

Immigrants in many countries have lower employment rates and earnings than natives. We analyze whether a more liberal citizenship policy improves the economic assimilation of immigrants in the host country. The empirical analysis relies on two reforms which created exogenous variation in the...

We investigate whether the decision to experiment with novel policies is influenced by electoral incentives. Our empirical setting is the U.S. welfare reform in 1996, which marked the most dramatic shift in social policy since the New Deal. We find that electoral incentives matter: governors...