In this paper, we seek to identify the causes of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We note that the importance of the question of redistribution was relatively minor when compared to the salience attached to issues of self-governance and autonomy of the numerous ethnic groups...

We exploit a historical experiment that occurred in Czechoslovakia after World War Two to study the drivers of social capital accumulation in an extremely unfavorable environment. Between 1945 and 1948, the Sudetenland became the scene of ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of nearly three...

This synthetic control study quantifies the economic costs of the Russo-Ukrainian war in terms of foregone entrepreneurial activity in both countries since the invasion of Crimea in 2014. Relative to its synthetic counterfactual, Ukraine’s number of self-employed dropped by 675,000,...

The paper formalizes and tests the hypothesis that greater exposure to big shocks induces stronger societal responses for adaptation and protection from future big shocks. Support for this hypothesis is found in various strands of the literature and in new empirical tests using cross-country...

This chapter introduces the author's selected papers on the economics of coercion and conflict. It defines coercion and conflict and relates them. In conflict, adversaries make costly investments in the means of coercion. The application of coercion does not remove choice but limits it to...

Utilizing over 100 million declassified Red Army personnel records from World War II, we study how state repression shapes soldiers' motivation to exert effort in fighting. Exploiting three complementary identification strategies, we find that soldiers from places with higher levels of pre-war...

Students of EU judicial politics have debated whether the threat of legislative override can influence the behaviour of the European Court of Justice. Yet because of the high political hurdles for the passage of Treaty amendments, Treaty revision has been dismissed as the "nuclear option",...

This paper exploits the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within East Germany at the end of WWII to study political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered, 40% of what would become the authoritarian German Democratic Republic was initially...

This paper uses a historical natural experiment - the case of Nazi Operational Zones (OZ) in Italy during WWII - to shed light on the legacy of foreign state repression. While the rest of Northern Italy was placed under Fascist rule, the OZ were de facto annexed by Nazi Germany and subjected to...

This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain in 1905-1945, a period of extreme political polarization. We find that the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the...