The role of women in Western societies changed dramatically in the 20th century. We study how political empowerment affected women's emancipation as reflected in their life choices like marital decisions and labor market participation. The staggered introduction of female suffrage in Swiss...

Despite intense policy debates, the relationship between social welfare and refugee crime remains understudied. Taking steps to address this gap, our study focuses on Switzerland, where mobility restrictions on exogenously assigned refugees coincide with cantons’ autonomy in setting social...

We propose a forensic approach to investigate the politico-economic forces that influence narrow vote outcomes in legislative assemblies. Applying nonparametric estimation techniques to a data set covering all roll call votes between 1990 and 2014, we can identify the existence of precise...

We revisit the prominent finding that women's incomes are disproportionally often observed just below the income of their partner. So far, this bunching has been explained by couple formation or couples' labor market decisions. We propose an additional mechanism: income misreporting in surveys....

We study the effect of institutional childcare on child penalties. Using Swiss administrative data, we exploit the staggered opening of childcare facilities across municipalities in the canton of Bern. We find that the presence of childcare facilities in the year of birth of the first child...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pandemic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Exploiting within-country variation, we show that a one standard deviation increase in social capital leads to...

The “child penalty” significantly reduces women’s lifetime earnings and pension savings, but it remains unclear whether these gaps are the deliberate result of forward-looking decisions. This paper provides novel evidence on the role of information constraints in mothers’ labor supply...

We study behavioral responses to local income taxes exploiting a special tax regime which applies to foreign employees residing in Switzerland. The used institutional setting generates two thresholds through which locally heterogeneous taxation is assigned: An income threshold at 120,000 Swiss...

The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences...