During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about forty percent of the total housing stock nationwide. With a large fraction of the male population gone, the reconstruction process had mainly fallen on women in postwar...

We investigate the effect of skin tone on employment probabilities in a longitudinal data set. Using an objective measure of skin tone from a light-spectrometer and a self-reported measure of race we find that over time the effect of skin tone on employment has diminished. These results hold...

In this chapter, we investigate the effects of vulnerability on income and employment in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia using a unique 2004 UNDP dataset. Treating the collapse of the former Yugoslavia as a natural experiment, we compare three groups that have been...

During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about forty percent of the total housing stock nationwide. With a large fraction of the male population gone, the reconstruction process had mainly fallen on women in postwar...

This paper provides causal evidence on long-term consequences of Jewish expulsions in Nazi Germany on the educational attainment and political outcomes of German children. We combine a unique city-level dataset on the fraction of Jewish population residing in Germany before the Nazi Regime with...

This paper provides causal evidence on the long-term legacies of postwar reconstruction and mandatory employment on women's family formation outcomes such as marriage, age at first marriage and divorce. We exploit city-by-cohort variation in the intensity of World War II reconstruction in...

In the 1980s the composition of immigrants to the U.S. shifted towards less-skilled workers. Around this time, real wages and employment of younger and less-educated U.S. workers fell. Some blame recent immigration shifts for the misfortunes of unskilled workers in the U.S. OLS estimates using...

This paper examines the persistent effects of historical labor market institutions and policies on women's long-term labor market outcomes. We quantify these enduring effects by exploring quasi-experimental variation in Germany's post-World War II mandatory reconstruction policy, which compelled...