Adolf Hitler's seizure of power was one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century. Yet, our understanding of which factors fueled the astonishing rise of the Nazis remains highly incomplete. This paper shows that religion played an important role in the Nazi party's electoral...

"We develop a Roy model of social interactions in which individuals sort into peer groups based on comparative advantage. Two key results emerge: First, when comparative advantage is the guiding principle of peer group organization, the effect of moving a student into an environment with...

Background facts / James Piereson -- The broad-based rise in return to top talent / Joshua D. Rauh -- The economic determinants of top income inequality / Charles I. Jones -- Intergenerational mobility and income inequality / Jörg L. Spenkuch -- The effects of redistribution policies on growth...

We combine personnel records of the United States federal bureaucracy from 1997-2019 with administrative voter registration data to study how ideological alignment between politicians and bureaucrats affects the personnel policies and performance of public organizations. We present four results....

We study two dimensions of complexity that may interfere with individual choice. The first one is object complexity, which corresponds to the difficulty in evaluating any given alternative in a choice set. The second dimension is composition complexity, which increases when suboptimal...

We develop a model of satisficing with evaluation errors that incorporates complexity at the level of individual alternatives. We test the model predictions in a novel data set with information on hundreds of millions of chess moves by experienced players. Consistent with the theory, complex...