Unemployment and Intimate-Partner Violence: A Gender-Identity Approach This paper analyzes the causal relationship between unemployment and intimate-partner violence (IPV) introducing a gender-identity approach. I argue that local social predominance of different family structures (stem vs nuclear) in the past shaped distinct present cultural norms regarding the appropriate role of men...

The Pass-through of Minimum Wages into US Retail Prices: Evidence from Supermarket Scanner Data We study the impact of increases in local minimum wages on the dynamics of prices in local grocery stores in the US during the 2001-2012 period. We find a signifcant impact of increasing minimum wages on...

The Spoils of War: Trade Shocks during WWI and Spain’s Regional Development This paper contributes new evidence on how labor market frictions can inhibit regional economic development and how a foreign demand shock can overcome them. I digitized new historical trade and labormarket data to examine a trade shock to...

Roots of Autocracy Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of humans from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, contributed...

“Bismarck’s Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline” We investigate the impact on mortality of the world’s first compulsory health insurance, established by Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Empire, in 1884. Employing a multi-layered empirical setup, we draw on international comparisons and difference-in-differences strategies using Prussian administrative panel data...

“Growing, shrinking and long run economic performance: historical perspectives on economic development” with John Wallis (University of Maryland). Using annual data from the thirteenth century to the present, we show that improved long run economic performance has occurred primarily through a decline in the rate and frequency of shrinking, rather...

“A Land ‘of Milk and Butter’: The Role of Elites for the Economic Development of Denmark” joint with: Peter Sandholt Jensen (University of Southern Denmark), Markus Lampe (Vienna University of Economics and Business) and Christian Volmar Skovsgaard (University of Southern Denmark) We explore the role of historical elites for development...