Those Who Stayed: Selection and Cultural Change in the Age of Mass Migration This paper studies the cultural causes and consequences of mass emigration from Scandinavia in the 19th century. I test the hypothesis that people with individualistic traits were more likely to emigrate, because they faced lower costs of...
The Electoral Impact of Wealth Redistribution: Evidence from the Italian Land Reform (with Lorenzo Casaburi and Miriam Venturini) Governments often implement large-scale redistribution policies to gain political support. However, little is known on whether such policies generate sizable gains, whether these gains are persistent, and why. We study the political...
The Last Yugoslavs: Ethnic Diversity and National Identity Nation-building is often proposed as a device for integration in ethnically divided societies. The determinants of national sentiment, however, remain imperfectly understood. This paper analyses the role of interethnic contact in the process of nation formation within the unique historical setting of...
The origins of common identity: Evidence from Alsace-Lorraine We study how more negative historical exposure to the actions of nation-states – like war, occupation, and repression – affects the formation of regional identity. The quasi-exogenous division of the French regions Alsace and Lorraine allows us to implement a geographical regression...
“Homeowners’ Risk Premia: Evidence from Zip Code Housing Returns”, joint work with Erasmo Giambona, Ricardo Lopez Aliouchkin and Patrick Tuijp. While homeownership provides consumption benefits, housing is risky. Using zip code housing returns, we document that homeowners are compensated for bearing housing risk. Our sample covers more than 9,000 zip...
The Refugee’s Dilemma: Evidence from Jewish Migration out of Nazi Germany In this paper we estimate the push and pull factors involved in the outmigration of Jews facing persecution in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1941 when migration was banned. Our empirical investigation makes use of a unique individual-level dataset...
Creative Destruction in the European State System: 1000-1850 (with Eric Weese) Using newly available data on the universe of boundary changes for all European states over 1000-1850, we argue that competition between states leads to short-term losses and long-term gains in economic growth. In event studies, cities switching be- tween...
