Who is the best formula 1 driver? Until today it was impossible to answer this question because the observable performance of a driver depends both on his talent and the quality of his cars. In this paper we for the first time separate driver talent from car quality by econometrically analyzing...

Who is the best Formula 1 driver? Until today it was impossible to answer this question because the observable performance of a driver depends both on his talent and the quality of his cars. In this article we separate for the first time driver talent from car quality by econometrically...

This paper investigates the robustness of 31 community speci?c explanatory variables for house prices in the Swiss metropolitan area of Zurich using Bayesian Model Averaging. The main variables which capitalize with a high posterior prob- ability are location speci?c real estate characteristics,...

We combine roll call votes and referendum decisions on identically worded legislative proposals to identify the effect of electoral rules on the way Swiss Members of Parliament (MPs) represent their constituents' preferences. We exploit the fact that MPs in both Houses of Parliament are elected...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that landlocked regions are systematically poorer than regions with ocean access, using panel data for 1,527 subnational regions in 83 nations from 1950-2014. This data structure allows us to exploit within-country-time variation only (e.g., regional variation...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors between zero to four from...

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...