We empirically identify politically-motivated redistricting and its consequences, studying the effects of changed electorate composition on US congressional district boundaries and on political outcomes. We exploit the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized millions of...

I exploit the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized millions of Hispanic migrants in the USA, to study the impact of immigrant legalization on schooling outcomes. Although undocumented migrants are entitled to public education, I find significant post-legalization...

We study the impact of immigrant legalization on fiscal transfers from state to local governments in the United States, exploiting variation in legal status from the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). State governments allocate more resources to IRCA counties, an allocation that is...

Can right-wing terrorism increase support for far-right populist parties, and if so, why? Exploiting quasi-random variation between successful and failed attacks across German municipalities, we find that successful attacks lead to significant increases in the vote share for the right-wing,...

What happens to the distribution of public resources when undocumented migrants obtain legal status through nation-wide amnesty? In this paper, we exploit variation in legal status from the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) to answer this question and find that state governors, of...

We examine the political response to immigrant legalization and its subsequent impact on the distribution of state and local spending by exploiting variation in legal status arising from the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized 3 million immigrants in the United...

Who drives social change—the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female...

We review an emerging experimental literature studying institutional change. Institutions are a key determinant of economic growth, but the "critical junctures" in which institutions can change are not precisely defined. For example, such junctures are often identified ex post, raising...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals' choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first present...

We present new data documenting medieval Europe's Commercial Revolution using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany's first...