Der spätere Nobelpreisträger Friedrich A. von Hayek publizierte kurz vor dem D-Day des Jahres 1944 sein analytisches Meisterstück The Road to Serfdom. Er präsentierte damit eine präzise Beschreibung der wesentlichen gesellschaftspolitischen Ursachen, die zu der nationalsozialistischen...

Can heroes legitimize strongly-proscribed and repugnant political behaviors? We exploit the purposefully arbitrary rotation of French regiments to measure the legitimizing effects of heroic credentials. 53% of French line regiments happened to rotate under a specific general, Philippe P'etain,...

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...

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in...