In Switzerland, two key church institutions - the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) - make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations' power to shape...

Exploiting a natural voting experiment we identify female preferences for real policy issues in the electorate. We then analyze whether female or male politicians in parliament more closely correspond to female preferences. Holding constant revealed constituent preferences, there is generally no...

We examine the effect of rising temperatures on regional economic development, using annual sub-national data for over 1500 regions in 152 countries between 1990 and 2017. In a panel setting with region- and country-year fixed effects, we find no evidence of a homogeneous or heterogeneous effect...

We investigate the effect of rising temperatures on economic development, using sub-national data for approximately 1,500 sub-national regions in 81 countries from the 1950s to the 2010s. Accounting for region- and time-fixed factors by means of a two-way fixed effects panel approach, we find no...

This paper examines the impact of outdoor temperature on media bias. We use 12 years of daily hand-coded data on the tonality of news broadcast by the three major US news networks, ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, all headquartered in New York City, and merge it with granular, geospatial...

Contrary to previous findings, we find a systematic and economically sizeable relationship between income levels and life expectancy in a panel dataset of 197 countries over 213 years. By itself, GDP/capita explains more than 64 percent of the variation in life expectancy. The Preston curve...

This paper examines the effect of female age at marriage on female education and educational gender inequality. We provide empirical evidence that early female marriage age significantly decreases female education with panel data from 1980 to 2010. Socio-cultural customs serve as an exogenous...

Electoral systems determine the role party affiliations play in political representation. According to conventional expectations, politicians’ party affiliations should influence political representation when they are elected under a proportional system. In contrast, majoritarian systems force...