Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision such as Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, Hirohito’s government launching a war against the United States, or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even if the decision is not ultimately fatal for...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating emigration of Jewish academics dismissed from their positions by the Nazi government. We use individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of dismissals to estimate causal effects. Academics with more ties to early émigrés...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating emigration of Jewish academics dismissed from their positions by the Nazi government. We use individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of dismissals to estimate causal eects. Academics with more ties to early émigrés...

Der spätere Nobelpreisträger Friedrich A. von Hayek publizierte kurz vor dem D-Day des Jahres 1944 sein analytisches Meisterstück The Road to Serfdom. Er präsentierte damit eine präzise Beschreibung der wesentlichen gesellschaftspolitischen Ursachen, die zu der nationalsozialistischen...

We study a far-reaching episode of demagoguery in American history. From the late 1940s to 1950s, anti-communist hysteria led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others gripped the nation. Hundreds of professionals in Hollywood were accused of having ties with the communist. We show that these...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

Most normative studies on child labor arrive at the conclusion that child labor is detrimental to social welfare. Child labor is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a political-economic...

This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current...

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision such as Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Hirohito's government launching a war against the United States, or Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even if the decision is not ultimately fatal for the...

This paper formalizes the principle that persecution power of government may generate violent contests over it. We show that this principle yields a large set of theoretical insights on different separation-of-powers institutions that can help to preempt such contests under different...

How does persecution affect who migrates? We analyze migrants' self-selection out of the USSR and its satellite states before and after the collapse of Communism using census microdata from the three largest destination countries: Germany, Israel, and the United States. We find that migrants...

"With a focus on Chile, this book demonstrates, with theoretical arguments and empirical studies, that focusing on the behavior of economic actors of the dictatorship is crucial to achieve basic objectives in terms of justice, memory, reparation, and non-repetition measures."

"After an Oregon mother finds an SOS letter in a box of Halloween decorations, a story unfolds about the man who wrote it: a Chinese political prisoner, sentenced without trial to work grueling hours at a "reeducation" camp-manufacturing the products sold in our own big-box stores."

Liberals argue that globalization, or growing interdependence among states, will transform societies towards more liberal values reflected in better respect for human rights. Skeptics of globalization, among them Marxists, critical theorists, and a large portion of the NGO community, see...

Staatliche Überwachung war und ist allgegenwärtig. Nichtsdestotrotz sind Erkenntnisse zu Nutzen und Kosten staatlicher Überwachungsmaßnahmen begrenzt. Dieser Beitrag fasst die Ergebnisse einer aktuellen Forschungsarbeit zusammen, in der die langfristigen Auswirkungen der Überwachung durch...

This paper explores the institutional determinants of persecution by studying the intensity of the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire. Political fragmentation exacerbated rent-seeking in the Holy Roman Empire. We argue that this fragmentation led to Jewish communities facing more...

In an unprecedented exploration of space and power in rural Xinjiang, a Chinese region home to the Muslim population of the Uyghurs, this book adopts a grounded theory approach and a trans-ethnic perspective into the complex and sensitive topic of land issues and agricultural land evictions in...

Natural disasters have been a major cause of human suffering. Countries with higher income, lower inequality, lower corruption, and more democratic regimes have been found to experience less casualties from disasters. Government repression, however, could also play a role in disaster...

Der Umgang mit staatlich verantworteten Menschenrechtsverletzungen in Autokratien stellt die Weltgemeinschaft noch immer vor große Herausforderungen. Weder über militärische (humanitäre) Interventionen, Wirtschaftssanktionen noch über die Variation bei den Entwicklungshilfeleistungen konnte...

Der Umgang mit staatlich verantworteten Menschenrechtsverletzungen in Autokratien stellt die Weltgemeinschaft noch immer vor große Herausforderungen. Weder über militärische (humanitäre) Interventionen, Wirtschaftssanktionen noch über die Variation bei den Entwicklungshilfeleistungen konnte...

We analyze the extent and effects of job-related persecution under communist regimes in the Czech Republic and Poland using a representative sample of individuals aged 50+ from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Retrospective information collected in the SHARELIFE interview...

We analyze the extent and effects of job-related persecution under communist regimes in the Czech Republic and Poland using a representative sample of individuals aged 50+ from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Retrospective information collected in the SHARELIFE interview...

Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according...

This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current...

Most normative studies on child labour arrive at the conclusion that child labour is detrimental to social welfare. Child labour is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a political-economic...