This paper uses the vote on the Swiss minaret initiative as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of negative attitudes towards immigrants on foreigners' location choices and thus indirectly on their utility. Based on a regression discontinuity design with unknown discontinuity...

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...

Many people are concerned about societal cohesion in the face of higher numbers of foreigners migrating to Western democracies. The challenge for the future is to find and adopt institutions that foster integration. We investigate how the right to vote in local elections affects immigrants'...

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are "too small" to follow Zipf's law.

We discuss important features and pitfalls of panel-data event study designs. We derive the following main results: First, event study designs and distributed-lag models are numerically identical leading to the same parameter estimates after correct reparametrization. Second, binning of effect...

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are "too small" to follow Zipf's law.