In international politics, intergovernmental treaties provide the rules of the game. Similar to private law, treaty designers face a trade-off between flexibility to adjust to unforeseen contingencies and the danger that the binding nature of the treaty and hence, the level of commitment by...

In this paper, we analyse the network of international major conventional weapons (MCW) transfers from 1950 to 2016, based on data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The dataset consists of yearly bilateral arms transfers between pairs of countries, which allows...

Which issue-related motives underlie voters' decision to switch parties at the polls? Do switchers stick to the newly chosen party, or do they oscillate in a short-term way at intermediate elections? Relying on the behavioral theory of elections, we assumed aspiration-based voting of boundedly...

The objective of advanced topic modeling is not only to explore latent topical structures, but also to estimate relationships between the discovered topics and theoretically relevant metadata. Methods used to estimate such relationships must take into account that the topical structure is not...

The objective of advanced topic modeling is not only to explore latent topical structures, but also to estimate relationships between the discovered topics and theoretically relevant metadata. Methods used to estimate such relationships must take into account that the topical structure is not...

We study heterogeneity in the effects of two pension reforms in Germany that closed pathways into early retirement: the abolition of an old-age pension scheme for women and the abolition of a pension after unemployment or part-time work. We focus on heterogeneity with respect to several...

We analyse the effects of specific measures for older employees (SMOE) on employment duration of workers aged 40 and above. Using longitudinal employer-employee data for German establishments, we account for worker and establishment heterogeneity and correct for stock-sampling. We find a...

The introduction, abolition and subsequent re-introduction of the minimum wage in the German electrical trade gave rise to series of natural experiments, which are used to study minimum wage effects. We find similar impacts in all three cases on wages, employment and the receipt of public...