We examine effects of government-imposed employment targets on firm behavior. Theoretically, such policies create “polarization,“ causing low-productivity firms to exit the market while others temporarily distort their employment upward. Dynamically, firms are incentivized to improve...

Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller's (2015) analysis of the costs of German reunification is a flagship study for the "synthetic control method" (SCM). Yet three issues can be identified. First, Abadie et al. remove countries that performed poorly in the 1990s from their donor pool, potentially...

This paper examines the long-term impact of West German television exposure on smoking behavior in East Germany, with a focus on gender-specific responses. Using data from 1989 and 2002 and leveraging quasi-random variation in West German TV signal availability across East German regions, we...

German reunification in 1990 marked the first sudden integration of a socialist and capitalist economy. Despite East Germany’s (EG) economic catch-up with West Ger- many (WG), the integration remains unfinished, as indicated by per capita output in EG still being about one-third lower. To...

An effective public administration is essential for state capacity and economic prosperity. We provide the first causal evidence on the short and long-term impact of secondments, a key instrument for building administrative capacity. Our context is the large-scale capacity building in the East...