Stadelmann David

We investigate the effect of rising temperatures on economic development, using sub-national data for approximately 1,500 sub-national regions in 81 countries from the 1950s to the 2010s. Accounting for region- and time-fixed factors by mea...

The empirical question of voting preferences and how these may change (swing) is yet to beanswered, as there is little first-hand microeconomic evidence on swing voting. We focus on the interactions between voters’ age and political cynic...

We investigate geo-referenced household-level data consisting of up to 206,896 individuals living in 21,826 localities across 28 sub-Saharan African countries over 20 years. We analyse the relevance of coastal proximity as a predictor of in...

The challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted scientists from different fields to evaluate whether the use of immunity certificates would allow for a safer and faster return to normality. This policy has been recently implemen...

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, there is an increased interest to understand how social inequalities, discrimination, and inclusion are related to the pandemic. Sub-Saharan Africa has been comparatively resilient regarding the nu...

We designed and implemented a survey to capture what scientists from around the world think about immunity certification. Responses from 12,738 scientists were captured and their distribution was tabulated by participants in health science ...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constitu...

This paper examines the effects of globalisation on the pace of governments implementing internationaltravel restrictions during the recent coronavirus pandemic. We find that more globalised countries experienced a longer delay in implement...

Trust in the health care system requires being confident that suffic ient and appropriatetreatments will be provided if needed. The CO VID-19 public health crisis is a significant, global, and (mostly) simultaneous test of the behav ioral i...

In March 2020, the second ballot of local elections in the German state of Bavaria was held under an official state of emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Bavarian mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Bet...

Pandemics and the reactions to pandemics increase the general problem of scarcity.Scarcity induced trade-offs are particularly relevant for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa as (1) the region suffers from numerous other diseases whose death t...

Although science has been an incredibly pow erful and revolutionary force, it is notclear whether science is suited to perf ormance under pressure; generally, science achieves best in its usual comfort zone of patience, caution, and slownes...

Behavioural responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalization risksthan they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioural responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our resul...

A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it alsogenerates impacts that are worth understan ding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective. In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spr...

The literature suggests that the household invests in the human capital of a child member notonly for altruistic reasons but also as insurance against future income shocks. Hence, the allocation of the child’s time between school and work...

We study the effect of temperature on economic development on the sub-national level, employing cross-sectional data for up to 15,533 sub-national units from two distinct sources. In contrast to the existing cross-country literature on the ...

This paper investigates the impact of improved water provision on individual health outcomes in rural Uganda. We merge household and individual panel datasets with sub-county level administrative data on water supply projects. Our approach ...

We present a new micro-based approach to evaluate the effect of water- and health-related developmentprojects. We collect information from 1.8 million individuals from DHS clusters (Demographic and Health Surveys) in 38 developing economies...

Electoral district magnitude varies across German electoral constituencies and overlegislative periods due to Germany’s electoral system. The number of seats in parliament per constituency is effectively random. This setting permits us to...

Using World Values Survey data, we show that individuals whose primary language usesthe same word for (financial) debt and (moral) guilt have a statistically significant and economically relevant lower probability of borrowing money. This r...

This paper empirically explores the link between mass media coverage of migration and immigration worries. Using detaileddata on media coverage in Germany, we show that the amount of media reports regarding migration issues is positively as...

Female education and its potential to empower women in the development process have engaged the interest of policy makers and academics over the years. By employing individual level data from Ghana and Uganda, we analyze whether female educ...

A majority of people in developing countries spend about 60 percent of their income on food, even though most of them are farmers. Hence, a change in food prices affects both their revenue as well as expenditure, and thereby their labor mar...

Usually, studies analyzing terrorism focus on the total number ofcasualties or attacks in a given county. However, per capita rates of terrorism are more likely to matter for individual welfare. Analyzing 214 countries from 1970-2014, we sh...

Empirical findings of a negative association between female participation in politics and the labor market, and levels of corruption have received great attention. We reproduce this correlation for 177 countries from 1998 to 2014. Once taki...

We examine whether immigrants have brought the missing women phenomenon to Germany and Switzerland.Using a range of micro data since 1990, we find no systematic gender selection of foreigners collectively, but a group of Balkan, Chinese and...

This paper examines the effect of female age at marriage on female education and educational gender inequality.We provide empirical evidence that early female marriage age significantly decreases female education with panel data from 1980 t...

As the public debate over stem cell research continues, the observable voting behaviour in Switzerland offers a unique opportunity to compare the voting behaviour of politicians with that of voters. In this paper, by analysing the outcomes ...

We introduce a binomial mixture model for estimating the probability of legislative shirking. The estimated probability strongly correlates with the observed frequency of shirking obtained by matching parliamentary roll-call votes with the ...

Combining referendum results with parliamentary votes of proportionally-elected politicians ofthe Swiss Lower House of Parliament, Giger and Klüver (American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming) find that sectional and cause interest...

We study a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a state initiative election. This institutional setting allows us to observe...

We analyze political representation of preferences of different income groups by matching referendum outcomes for low, middle,and high-income voters with individual legislators' decisions on identical policy proposals. Results indicate that...

Do politicians with a military background decide differently on military affairs? We investigate the informative institutional setting of the Swiss conscription army. Politicians who served in the military have a higher probability of accep...

In Switzerland, two key church institutions - the Conference of Swiss Bishops(CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) - make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to dire...

We identify the impact of transparency in political decision -making on thequality of political representation with a difference- in-difference strategy. The quality of political representation is measured by observed divergence of parliame...

We compare the votes of parliamentary representatives and their constituents on a popular initiativethat directly aimed at weakening the separation of powers in 1922 in Switzerland. We analyze whether the strength of individual ties to the ...

We exploit a natural measure of congruence between politicians and theirconstituency' bnm bnnb fgvhjuis preferences to directly quantify the extent of legislative shirking and evaluate the mechanism of the median voter model. The median vot...

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period(1848-2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held o...

What determines political candidates? election prospects? We match roll call votes of candidates forthe majority elected upper house of parliament who were previously in the lower house with revealed preferences of their constituency. There...

Electoral systems determine the role party affiliations play in politicalrepresentation. According to conventional expectations, politicians’ party affiliations should influence political representation when they are elected by proportion...

We analyze whether female or male members of parliament adhere moreclosely to citizens’ revealed preferences with quasi-experimental data. By matching individual representatives’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with real refere...

We match individual senators’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24real referenda decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording. This setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model’s quality with revealed ...

In parliament, individual representatives vote with a certain probability according to theirconstituents’ preferences. Thus, the mechanism of the Condorcet Jury Theorem can be fruitfully applied to parliamentary representation: The probab...

We assess the effect of constituents’ preferences on legislators’ decisions within a quasiexperimental setting: In the Swiss referendum process, citizens and legislators reveal their preferences for legislative proposals. We match roll ...

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for themajority?s preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis...

Fiscal packages usually capitalize into house prices. But if enough land forconstruction is available, housing developers can supply new houses and capitalization may disappear. We provide a theoretical model in which income taxes and publi...

This paper investigates the robustness of 31 community speci?c explanatory variables for house prices in the Swiss metropolitan area of Zurich using Bayesian Model Averaging. The main variables which capitalize with a high posterior prob- a...

Public debts capitalize into property prices. Therefore, property owners tend to favor tax over debt financing for government spending. In contrast, tenants do not suffer from debt capitalization. Thus, they tend to favor debt over tax fina...

Rational individuals know that present government debts transform into higher future taxes. The Ricardian equivalence implies that the burden of the debt is not shifted between generations because of compensating intergenerational transfers...

Who is the best formula 1 driver? Until today it was impossible to answer this question because the observable performance of a driver depends both on his talent and the quality of his cars. In this paper we for the first time separate driv...