Discussion Paper No. 425
September 15, 2023
Selective Default Expectations
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This paper explores how selective default expectations affect the pricing of sovereign bonds in a historical laboratory: the German default of the 1930s. We analyze yield differentials between identical government bonds traded across various creditor countries before and after bond market segmentation. We show that, when secondary debt markets are segmented, a large selective default probability can be priced in bond yield spreads. Selective default risk accounted for one third of the yield spread of German external bonds over the risk-free rate during the 1930s. Selective default expectations arose from differences in the creditor countries' economic power over the debtor.
Keywords:
sovereign risk; debt default; secondary markets; creditor discrimination;
JEL-Classification:
F13; F34; G12; G15; H63; N24; N44;
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Discussion Paper No. 408
July 5, 2023
State Repression, Exit, and Voice
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What is the political legacy of state repression? Using local variation in state repression during the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, we investigate the effects of repression on political beliefs and behavior. We find that past state repression decreases votes for an authoritarian incumbent while enhancing electoral competition and support for democratic values four decades later. At the same time, individuals become more cautious in their interactions with the local community: they exhibit less trust, participate less in community organizations, and engage less with local government. Our theoretical model suggests that these opposing forces arise because experiencing repression bolsters preferences for pluralism while also heightening the perceived cost of dissent. Consequently, citizens are more likely to support the opposition in elections (voice) but engage less in civil society (exit) to avoid publicly revealing their political views. Exploring channels of persistence, we demonstrate that repression cultivates a lasting fear of violence as a societal threat, and that genocide memorials and remembrance ceremonies maintain the collective memory of the atrocities.
Keywords:
state repression; political beliefs and behavior; collective memory; state-society relations;
JEL-Classification:
D7; N4; O1;
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Discussion Paper No. 407
Female Education and Social Change
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Does access to education facilitate the emergence of a human capital elite from which social activists, and thus, social change can emerge? Assembling a city-level panel of the political, intellectual, and economic elite throughout German history, we find that the opening of schools providing secondary education for women increased their representation among the human capital elite. These elites challenged the status quo and developed critical ideas that resonated in cities with higher human capital, connecting women to form a social movement. We find no evidence of other city-specific indicators of economic and gender-specific cultural change affecting our results. Differential returns to education are also unrelated to the increasing representation of women among the human capital elite, as the opening of gender-specific schools has no impact on the opposite gender.
Keywords:
female education; human capital; women's rights;
JEL-Classification:
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Discussion Paper No. 390
March 16, 2023
Can Grassroots Organizations Reduce Support for Right-Wing Populism via Social Media?
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The rise of right-wing populism throughout Western democracies coincided with an increasing adoption of social media – both among supporters and opponents of right-wing populism alike. In light of these trends, we assess whether grassroots organizations are effective in combating right-wing populism via social media. We study this question using a tightly controlled online field experiment embedded in the Facebook campaign of a German grassroots organization. Leveraging geo-spatial variation in where the organization disseminated its Facebook ads targeting Germany’s leading right-wing populist party (AfD), we find that the campaign did not significantly affect the AfD’s vote share and turnout. Drawing on data from a complementary online experiment, we show that insufficient outreach on Facebook together with the absence of individual-level responses of attitudes and behavior explains why the campaign did not meaningfully shape aggregate election outcomes.
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Discussion Paper No. 379
February 2, 2023
Trade and Regional Economic Development
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A central argument for trade liberalization is that when the `gains from trade' are shared, countries see large gains in economic development. In this paper, I empirically evaluate this argument and assess the impact of elite capture on regional development. Africa provides a unique study ground because the arbitrary placement of country borders during the colonial period partitioned hundreds of ethnic groups across borders. This partitioning is a source of variation in population heterogeneity and cross-country connectedness that is independent of economic considerations. Thus, African borders provide both a credible instrument for bilateral trade flows and enable the assignment of trade flows ---and their impacts--- to individuals. I find that while ethnic networks increase trade flows, increased trade activity decreases subnational economic development when measured by satellite data or individual wealth. I show that this counter-intuitive result comes from elite groups capturing the gains from trade, with detrimental impacts on trust and democratic progress in society.
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Discussion Paper No. 374
January 27, 2023
Testing Marx
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We study the dynamics of capital accumulation, income inequality, capital concentration, and voting up to 1914. Based on new panel data for Prussian regions, we re-evaluate the famous Revisionism Debate between orthodox Marxists and their critics. We show that changes in capital accumulation led to a rise in the capital share and income inequality, as predicted by orthodox Marxists. But against their predictions, this did neither lead to further capital concentration nor to more votes for the socialists. Instead, trade unions and strike activity limited income inequality and fostered political support for socialism, as argued by the Revisionists.
Keywords:
income inequality; concentration; top incomes; capital share; capital accumulation;
JEL-Classification:
D31; D63; J31; N30;
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Discussion Paper No. 344
November 30, 2022
Income Misperception and Populism
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We propose that false beliefs about the own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Along with the subjects' receptiveness to right-wing populism, we elicit their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households. We find that people with pessimistic beliefs about their income position are more attuned to populist statements. Key to understanding the misperception-populism relationship are strong gender differences in the mechanism: Misperception triggers income dissatisfaction for both men and women, but the former are much more likely to channel their discontent into affection for populist ideas.
Keywords:
perception; income; populism;
JEL-Classification:
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Discussion Paper No. 217
November 10, 2021
On the Origins of National Identity
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What are the origins of national identity? We extend the model by Alesina et al. (2019) to analyze the incentives of elites to use specific types of identity policies in response to shocks, and the extent to which such policies should be effective. To elicit changes in identity we use data on first names given in German cities between 1800 and 1875. We show that parents in cities treated by nation building policies responded by choosing first names of German origin for their children. To control for familyspecific confounding factors, we exploit within family variation. We also show that the response can be conditional on cultural distance to the elite. Finally, Germanic first names had remarkable predictive power for behaviour. We find that individuals with Germanic first names made different marriage choices and were more likely to get actively involved and decorated during the German-French War in 1870/71 and the First World War.
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Discussion Paper No. 285
Trade Shocks, Labor Markets and Elections in the First Globalization
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This paper studies the economic and political effects of a large trade shock in agriculture – the grain invasion from the Americas – in Prussia during the first globalization (1871-1913). We show that this shock accelerated the structural change in the Prussian economy through migration of workers to booming cities. In contrast to studies using today’s data, we do not observe declining per capita income, health outcomes or political polarization in counties aected by foreign competition. Our results suggest that the negative and persistent eects of trade shocks we see today are not a universal feature of globalization, but depend on labor mobility. For our analysis, we digitize data from Prussian industrial and agricultural censuses on the county level and combine it with national trade data at the product level. We exploit the cross-regional variation in cultivated crops within Prussia and instrument with Italian trade data to isolate exogenous variation.
Keywords:
globalization; import competition; labor market; elections; agriculture; migration; trade shock;
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Discussion Paper No. 207
November 9, 2021
Rural Transformation, Inequality, and the Origins of Microfinance
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What determines the development of rural financial markets? Starting from a simple theoretical framework, we derive the factors shaping the market entry of rural microfinance institutions across time and space. We provide empirical evidence for these determinants using the expansion of credit cooperatives in the 236 eastern counties of Prussia between 1852 and 1913. This setting is attractive as it provides a free market benchmark scenario without public ownership, subsidization, or direct regulatory intervention. Furthermore, we exploit features of our historical set-up to identify causal effects. The results show that declining agricultural staple prices, as a feature of structural transformation, leads to the emergence of credit cooperatives. Similarly, declining bank lending rates contribute to their rise. Low asset sizes and land inequality inhibit the regional spread of cooperatives, while ethnic heterogeneity has ambiguous effects. We also offer empirical evidence suggesting that credit cooperatives accelerated rural transformation by diversifying farm outputs.
Keywords:
microfinance; credit cooperatives; rural transformation; land inequality; prussia;
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