Scarcity of female academics has been well documented for math-intensive or STEM fields. We investigate whether a lack of female instructors creates ademand for diversity on the student side. In an incentivized instructor-choice experiment on MTurk, we experimentally vary the gender balancedness...

We study how to promote compliance with rules in everyday situations. Having access to unique data on the universe of users of all public libraries in Barcelona, we test the effect of sending email messages with different contents. We find that users return their items earlier if asked to do so...

Using historical data for all Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. The main innovation in this paper is that we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity and instrumental variables to address the potential...

This article explores the relationship between governmental deterrence, crime, and the strength of social norms against crime. Based on experimental research in psychology and economics, I argue that the strength of the social norm of "not committing a crime" is shaped by social interactions....

In spite of increasing representation of women in politics, little is known about their impact on policies. Comparing outcomes of parliaments with different shares of female members does not identify their causal impact because of possible differences in the underlying electorate. This paper...

Using a new data set on Swiss state and local governments from 1890 to today, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on...

This article empirically investigates whether law affects behavior beyond deterrence ("expressive function of law"). With Swiss panel data, I find that the legal abolition of the voting duty significantly decreased average turnout, even though the fines for not voting have only been symbolic. As...

Using a new dataset of Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. Our analysis is novel in two ways: first, we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity; second, we combine a new instrument with fixed effects to...

We study how to promote compliance with rules in every day situations. Having access to unique data on the universe of users of all public libraries in Barcelona, we test the effect of sending email messages with different contents. We find that users return their items earlier if asked to do...