A majority of people in developing countries spend about 60 percent of their income on food, even though most of them are farmers. Hence, a change in food prices affects both their revenue as well as expenditure, and thereby their labor market decisions. Using the Uganda National Panel Survey...

Female education and its potential to empower women in the development process have engaged the interest of policy makers and academics over the years. By employing individual level data from Ghana and Uganda, we analyze whether female education has a direct bargaining effect on six household...

Die wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Erfolge der Schweiz werden oft auf zwei für sie typische politische Institutionen zurückgeführt: direkte Demokratie und Föderalismus. Wir vermuten, dass eine dritte, bisher weitgehend vernachlässigte Institution eine ähnlich wichti- ge Rolle...

This paper empirically explores the link between mass media coverage of migration and immigration worries. Using detailed data on media coverage in Germany, we show that the amount of media reports regarding migration issues is positively associated with concerns about immigration among the...

Using World Values Survey data, we show that individuals whose primary language uses the same word for (financial) debt and (moral) guilt have a statistically significant and economically relevant lower probability of borrowing money. This relation holds even when we control for a large array of...

Do crises erode trust in government? To answer this question, we leverage the quasi-experimental setting of the sharply increased military threat to the neutral county of Switzerland during the two world wars as an exogenous shock. In doing so, we exploit a unique feature of Swiss politics:...

Electoral district magnitude varies across German electoral constituencies and over legislative periods due to Germany's electoral system. The number of seats in parliament per constituency is effectively random. This setting permits us to investigate exogenous variations in district magnitude...

We present a new micro-based approach to evaluate the effect of water- and health-related development projects. We collect information from 1.8 million individuals from DHS clusters (Demographic and Health Surveys) in 38 developing economies between 1986 and 2017. By geocodes, we combine cluster...

We study the effect of temperature on economic development on the sub-national level, employing cross-sectional data for up to 15,533 sub-national units from two distinct sources. In contrast to the existing cross-country literature on the temperature-income relationship, our setting allows us...

The literature suggests that the household invests in the human capital of a child member not only for altruistic reasons but also as insurance against future income shocks. Hence, the allocation of the child's time between school and work is a function of the risk preference of the household...