We investigate geo-referenced household-level data consisting of up to 206,896 individuals living in 21,826 localities across 28 sub-Saharan African countries over 20 years. We analyse the relevance of coastal proximity as a predictor of individual economic living standards. Our setting allows...

This paper analyses the effect of international borders and of trade agreements at international borders on subnational (i.e. regional) growth. We construct an extensive panel dataset covering 1,350 regions in 86 countries worldwide between 1950 and 2017. Our results show that international...

Bavarian mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the Bavarian state government announced an official state of emergency with measures to fight the spread of Covid-19, including a shutdown of...

The empirical question of voting preferences and how these may change (swing) is yet to be answered, as there is little first-hand microeconomic evidence on swing voting. We focus on the interactions between voters' age and political cynicism. Towards this end, we apply a stated and revealed...

To better understand potential relationships between income and terrorism, we study data for 1,527 subnational regions in 75 countries between 1970 and 2014. Results consistently imply an inverted U-shape that remains robust to accounting for a comprehensive set of region-level covariates,...

We analyze political representation of preferences of different income groups by matching referendum outcomes for low, middle, and high-income voters with individual legislators decisions on identical policy proposals. Results indicate that legislators more closely represent preferences of rich...

We jointly analyze the causal effects of geography, trade integration, and institutional quality on different income groups for developing and developed countries from 1983 to 2012. Favorable geographic conditions tend to discriminate strongly between income groups as low incomes benefit whereas...

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848-2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer...

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...

The role of electoral incentives vs. selection is ideally analyzed in a setting where the same legislators are selected to decide on policies under different electoral rules and where voter preferences on policies can be precisely measured. This is the first paper to look at such a situation....