What happens when immigrant girls are given increased opportunities to integrate into the workplace and society, but their parents value more traditional cultural outcomes? Building on Akerlof and Kranton's identity framework (2000), we construct a simple theoretical model which shows how...

We study the impact of fiscal revenue shocks on local fiscal policy. We focus on the very volatile revenues from the immovable property gains tax in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, and analyze fiscal behavior following large and rare positive and negative revenue shocks. We apply causal...

We propose a novel approach for causal mediation analysis based on changes-in-changes assumptions restricting unobserved heterogeneity over time. This allows disentangling the causal effect of a binary treatment on a continuous outcome into an indirect effect operating through a binary...

We analyze the impact of obtaining a residence permit on foreign workers' labor market and residential attachment. To overcome the usually severe selection issues, we exploit a unique migration lottery that randomly assigns access to residence permits for workers with an employment contract in...

What makes diversity unifying in some settings but divisive in others? We examine how the mixing of ethnic groups in German schools affects intergroup cooperation and trust. We leverage the quasi-random assignment of students to classrooms within schools to obtain variation in the type of...

This study is the first to estimate mother's marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for job amenities directly. Its identification strategy relies on German maternity leave length. The key aspect of the maternal leave framework is that mothers can decide whether and when to return to their guaranteed...

Economic theory predicts that adverse shocks during early childhood have detrimental short- and long-run consequences for children's development. We examine this hypothesis by analyzing the short-and long-run effects on children's health and education of a specific shock: housing damages caused...

Does after-school care provision promote mothers' employment and balance the allocation of paid work among parents of schoolchildren? We address this question by exploiting variation in cantonal (state) regulations of after-school care provision in Switzerland. To establish exogeneity of...

Does granting birthright citizenship help immigrant children integrating in the host country's educational system? We address this question using a reform of the German naturalization law in 1999 that entitled children born after January 1, 2000 with birthright citizenship. We use a...

A currently high-ranking question on the political agenda of many developed countries relates to the intensive margin of child care and thus to the effects of prolonging the opening hours of child care institutions. This study adds to the scarce literature on this question and investigates the...