German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

We employ a neoclassical growth model to assess the impact of financial liberalization in a developing country on capital owners` and workers` consumption and welfare. We find in a baseline calibration for an average non-OECD country that capitalists suffer a 42 percent reduction in permanent...

Resource-rich dictatorships are more inclined to repress civil society than others. In this paper, we identify a tradeoff between political rents from natural resources and the organizational density of civil society. This organizational density determines the extent to which citizens can...

How does a negative labor demand shock impact fertility? I analyze this question in the context of the East German fertility decline after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I exploit differential pressure for restructuring across East German industries which led to unexpected, exogenous, and...

Do sanctions strengthen the targeted regime? I analyze the 2014 imposition of Western sanctions on Russia and its impact on voting. The US and the EU introduced targeted measures against Russian entities and individuals related to Putin's regime. Using polling station-level data I investigate...