Expectation formation in a new environment: Evidence from the German Reunification. Joint with Johannes Wohlfart Exploiting the German reunification, we study how households adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. East Germans expect higher inflation than West Germans decades after reunification. These differences are likely driven by the persistent...

Carrots and Sticks: Targeting the Opposition in an Autocratic Regime. Autocratic regimes can use carrots or sticks to ensure that they are not overthrown by their opposition in the population. Carrots, i.e. allocation of resources, increase popularity of the regime, but can induce moral hazard if the opposition learns that...

Democratic Support for the Bolshevik Revolution: An Empirical Investigation of 1917 Constituent Assembly Elections Scholars have long-debated the causes of popular support for the Russian Revolution and how this support translated into successful regime change. We systematically investigate cross-district and cross-city variation in popular support for the Bolsheviks using voting...

Was Domar Right? Serfdom and Factor Endowments in Bohemia. Joint with Alexander Klein and Jeremy Edwards. Are institutions shaped by factor endowments? Labor-coercion institutions such as serfdom and slavery, which profoundly restricted economic growth, were ascribed by Domar to high land-labor ratios. But historical evidence appeared to refute this hypothesis. We...

Intergenerational Mobility in China across Space and Time Inequality is an important issue in many countries, and intergenerational mobility is one of the key mechanisms for alleviating inequality. What drives mobility? Why do some areas generate higher rates of mobility than others? This paper has two objectives. First, using individual...

Inheritances and the concentration of personal wealth in Italy from Unification to the Great War (1862-1915) In this paper, we estimate new series of wealth concentration for Italy during the so-called first globalisation, a time when inequality reached secular peaks in advanced economies, while Italy enjoyed a ‘benevolent’ industrial take-off....

The Persistence of the Criminal Justice Gender Gap: Evidence from 200 Years of Judicial Decisions We document persistent gender gaps favoring females in jury convictions and judge sentences in nearly 200 years of London trials, which are unexplained by case characteristics. We find that three sharp changes in punishment severity...