We analyse a model in which families may either be 'traditional' single-earner with caring for the child at home or 'modern' double-earner households using market child care. Family policies may favour either the one or the other group, like market care subsidies vs. cash for care. Policies are...

We empirically examine the relationship between shares of foreigners and shares of votes cast for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the major anti-immigrant party in the 2017 German parliamentary election. The classic theory on the political economy of migration supposes that immigration...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

Electoral district magnitude varies across German electoral constituencies and over legislative periods due to Germany's electoral system. The number of seats in parliament per constituency is effectively random. This setting permits us to investigate exogenous variations in district magnitude...

Retrospective voting may be an effective instrument for overcoming moral hazard of politicians if voters evaluate the performance of elected representatives correctly. Whether democratic experience helps them to properly assess a policymaker's performance is less well understood. We analyze...

This paper investigates the effect of aggregate-level information shocks regarding support for a populist right-wing party on the individual disposition to report a respective political preference in survey interviews. Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its...

This paper uses a simple model based on the board game Monopoly to analyze the drivers of house prices and wealth inequality. Simulations show that inequality generally builds up fast even if players have equal starting conditions and house prices are stable; rising house prices imply more...

The role of electoral incentives vs. selection is ideally analyzed in a setting where the same legislators are selected to decide on policies under different electoral rules and where voter preferences on policies can be precisely measured. This is the first paper to look at such a situation....

I use game-theoretical models to compare a sender's expected payoff under two methods of wielding influence under incomplete information: offering rewards or threatening punishments. Attempts to influence another's behaviour can have the perverse effect of actually encouraging the behaviour that...

Drawing on panel data from six elections between 1998 and 2017 in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of immigration - described by Germany's interior minister as the "mother of all political problems" - on electoral support for the far right and the far left. Our identification strategy is...