The concept of "Social Europe" encompasses the European Union's social policy framework. This paper argues that the financial crisis of 2007-2009, the subsequent Euro crisis, and the ensuing austerity measures diverted significant attention away from Social Europe. This neglect led to declining...

This study examines how early-life exposure to food scarcity influences individuals' long-term time preferences and savings behavior. To this end, we analyze hand-collected historical data on livestock availability during World War II at the provincial level, alongside detailed survey data on...

We show that migrating extremists shape political landscapes toward their ideology in the long run. We exploit the unexpected division of the state of Upper Austria into a US and a Soviet occupation zone after WWII. Zoning prompts large-scale Nazi migration to US occupied regions. Regions that...

We analyze the long-term impact of the resettlement of the Sudetenland after World War~II on residential migration. This event involved expulsion of ethnic Germans and almost complete depopulation of an area of a country and its rapid resettlement by 2 million Czech inhabitants. Results based on...

We investigate how negatively reciprocal traits of unemployed individuals interact with "sticks" policies imposing constraints on individual job search effort in the context of the German welfare system. For this we merge survey data of long-term unemployed individuals, containing indicators of...

A major theory from social psychology claims that external threats can strengthen group identities and cooperation. This paper exploits the Russian invasion in Ukraine 2014 as a sudden increase in the perceived military threat for eastern European Union member states, in particular for the...

We investigate how negatively reciprocal traits of unemployed individuals interact with "sticks" policies imposing constraints on individual job search effort in the context of the German welfare system. For this we merge survey data of long-term unemployed individuals, containing indicators of...

Vor 100 Jahren haben die "Erzbergerschen Steuerund Finanzreformen" die öffentlichen Finanzen in Deutschland grundlegend umgestaltet. Sie zentralisierten die Finanzverfassung und modernisierten das Steuersystem umfassend. Einkommensteuer, Körperschaftsteuer und Erbschaftsteuer wurden...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Political networks are an important feature of the political and economic landscape of countries. Despite their ubiquity and significance, information on such networks has proven hard to collect due to a pervasive lack of transparency. However, with the advent of big data and artificial...