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European Journal of Political Economy (2023): 80
Media Coverage: Wirtschaftswoche, Welt
German Policy Brief: Wirtschaftsdienst
This paper was awarded the Wicksell Prize of the European Public Choice Society in 2019 and won the Best Poster Award at the RatSWD Conference in 2020.
This paper investigates the effect of party connections on fiscal policies. Using a novel data set for mayoral elections in Germany and regression discontinuity design, I find that party alignment between a local mayor and the state government increases transfers to a municipality by 20% per year. Such favoritism has been interpreted as a sign of partisanship and blamed on central governments which use public funds for partisan purposes. I show that local political conditions, such as reelection incentives and information transmis- sion can account for the alignment effect. Taken together, the results provide alternative channels for the interpretation of alignment effects.
Under Review
We study how the presence of a college affects the local economy using administrative data. Our analysis exploits the opening of new institutions of tertiary education across Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. The new college substantially increased the student population and share of high-skilled workers in the region. Yet, we find no effect on regional wages or em- ployment indicating that the local economies did not experience additional growth through skill-biased technological change, for instance. Instead, there is sizable heterogeneity in the local gains: high-tech firms in manufacturing absorb most of the new college graduates, esp. in engineering professions. We find little impact on the low- or high-skilled service sector or employment in managerial professions. Finally, we show that local labor market conditions prior to the opening matter: in regions with a more dynamic labor market, the opening encourages firm creation and a permanent upskilling of the workforce. Areas with a less dynamic labor market experience little sustained growth in high-skilled workers who are absorbed by incumbent firms.
The Economic Consequences of the War: Germany after World War IÂ
The Economic Consequences of the War: Germany after World War IÂ
This paper was awarded the PEDD Young Scholar Award 2023 and the RGS Best Paper Award 2023.
We investigate the role of World War I casualties on German counties in the interwar period. We geocoded the birth places of 8.5 million entries from official casualty lists, and linked them to county-level censuses for the pre- and post-war period. Our results are based on difference-in-differences estimations and show that counties with a higher casualty rate faced significant out-migration, predominantly of women after the war. This occurred as a response to deteriorating economic activity, decreasing wages, and an increased gender wage gap. Lastly, we find that more affected counties showed higher support for radical right-wing parties in the interwar elections.
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