We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

We revisit the prominent finding that women's incomes are disproportionally often observed just below the income of their partner. So far, this bunching has been explained by couple formation or couples' labor market decisions. We propose an additional mechanism: income misreporting in surveys....

We show that the discontinuity in the distribution of surveyed female income shares at the margin where a woman would outearn her partner is primarily driven by norm induced misreporting in surveys. We draw on unique Swiss data combining survey and administrative information for the same...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

We study the effect of childcare availability on child penalties. Using Swiss administrative data, we exploit the staggered opening od childcare facilities across municipalities in the canton of Bern. We find that the presence of childcare facilities in the year of birth of the first child...

We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent COVID-19 pan­demic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Swe­den, Switzerland and the UK. We exploit within-country variation in social capital and COVID-19 cases to show that high-social-capital...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...