Working Papers

Regional economic disparities within countries have become increasingly large, often surpassing the disparities observed between countries. To address regional inequality, governments have been turning away from standard subsidies and are experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy. This paper estimates the causal effect of public employment reallocation on local labor markets. I study the ‘Heimatstrategie,’ which relocates around 3,000 public sector jobs from Munich to economically lagging regions in Bavaria, Germany. Using novel data on 60 agency relocations between 2015 and 2025, I exploit the government’s quantitative selection criteria for receiving municipalities and implement a long-differences design comparing treated Bavarian municipalities to Mahalanobis-matched control municipalities in other German states. My estimates show that relocations increased private sector employment shares by up to 2.3% (1.3 percentage points), reduced unemployment rates by up to 11.9% (0.33 percentage points), and increased local population by up to 1.6% without harming sending locations. The effect at receiving regions corresponds to a public-to-private jobs multiplier of 1.08. To assess general equilibrium effects of the relocation program, I implement a quantitative spatial model with a two-sector (public and private) framework, which confirms positive private employment effects in receiving and sending locations and finds negligible welfare effects.

Presented at: 12th Ifo Dresden Workshop on Regional Economics, 10th CGDE Doctoral Workshop, IEB Barcelona IWIP Seminar,  AQR Research Seminar, University of Barcelona (invited), 13th European UEA Meeting, 2024 RSA Annual Conference, Aix-Marseille Research Seminar (invited), NBER Conference on Place-Based Policies, 14th European UEA Meeting, 6th World Labor Conference in Toronto, VfS Congress, Public Economics Colloquium Leipzig (invited), CREST Urban Workshop, CEPR 2025 Paris Symposium, IAB Research Colloquium (invited), 2nd Early Career Women in Economic Geography and Spatial Economics at LSE (March 2026)


This paper studies whether place-based policies affect electoral outcomes by exploiting a major public-sector relocation program in Germany, which relocated more than 60 agencies and 3,000 civil-service jobs to municipalities in structurally weaker regions of Bavaria between 2015 and 2025. Exploiting exogenous variation generated by the state’s rule-based allocation of public agencies, we find sizable electoral effects in treated municipalities. The incumbent governing party, CSU, which actively claimed credit for the policy, gains just over 2 percentage points in state elections, while its coalition partner, the Free Voters, loses about 1.6 points. The program also reduces support for the far-right populist party AfD by roughly 0.5–1 point. Turnout falls by 0.72 percentage points in the first election following a relocation, consistent with a modest demobilization effect. In federal elections, we observe aligned but smaller shifts in vote shares (CSU +0.7 percentage points; Free Voters −1.5 percentage points; AfD −0.3 percentage points).

Presented at: 18th ifo Workshop in Political Economy, European Public Choice Society Meeting 2025, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance (invited)


The vote share of far-right, populist parties has almost doubled in Western countries in the last decade. This sudden increase led to a growing body of literature, especially in Economics and Political Science. Yet, due to disagreement among the disciplines, measurement, and identification issues, the main drivers of far-right populism remain unclear. It is also unclear if some of the determinants analyzed so far might have a non-linear relationship with the far-right, populist vote share. Against this backdrop, we create an extensive new dataset with over 26 determinants of far-right populism in over 30 countries between 1980 and 2019. We then employ Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to identify the most robust drivers of populism across all possible models. We move on to apply Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) to determine non-linearities in those drivers’ relationship with far-right populism. We find that while the trade-to-GDP ratio decreases far-right populism, imports from China increase it, however, only after a threshold value. Regarding the effect of immigration on far-right populism, we find that higher migrant stock decreases far-right populist vote share, confirming the contact hypothesis. In contrast, we find a threshold effect regarding refugee migration. Regarding culture, we find a strong positive relationship between religiosity and far-right populism, confirming the idea that religion forms a group identity and plays into the cards of populist rhetoric of the division of society into the moral people and the corrupt elite. 

Presented at: Annual Congress of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics 2024, Aix-Marseille Research Seminar (invited)


Xu (2022) estimates the causal impact of bank failures on the level of trades with a staggered difference-in-differences design and an IV strategy with Bartik instrument, using the 1866 banking crisis as a quasi-natural experiment. Findings, based on historical data on the trades and loans between London banks and banks around the world, show that countries exposed to bank failures in London immediately exported significantly less and did not recover their lost growth relative to unexposed places. Moreover, the effect lasted for decades. First, we reproduce the paper’s main findings by running the original code and uncover three issues, one of which that slightly affects the main estimates reported in the study. Second, we test the robustness of the results to (1) removing weights from the regressions, (2) using a spatial HAC correction for the standard errors, and (3) implementing a method for possibly heterogeneous treatment effects with a staggered difference-indifferences design. Overall, we conclude that the main findings are valid and robust.