We investigate the willingness of politicians in the German Bundestag to interact with voters, drawing on data capturing direct interchanges between citizens and their elected representatives to measure their responsiveness. In a setting without term limits, we examine whether electoral incentives influence politicians’ engagement with citizens. Our theoretical model predicts, and empirical results confirm, that politicians who are not seeking reelection become less responsive to voters, especially as election day approaches. This decline is attributed to a behavioral response resulting from a decrease in intra-party standing, rather than to a change in motivation or personal ideological convictions. Politicians retiring due to age or health reasons maintain consistent levels of interaction with voters, in contrast to those leaving due to pressure within their party or due to career changes, who exhibit decreased engagement with voters. Our findings offer novel insights into the role of incentives and constraints for political behavior in countries without mandatory term limits.

How does district magnitude affect the quality of political representation? The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) predicts that majority decisions improve with group size when members vote independently and are more likely than not to be correct. We test whether this aggregation mechanism applies to political decisions by examining whether larger legislative delegations better reflect constituent preferences. Nominal district magnitude often overstates the number of independent decision-makers because of party discipline. We therefore introduce effective district magnitude as a measure that more accurately captures the number of independently voting politicians within a constituency. Using 263 Swiss referenda (1992–2024) matched to parliamentary decisions, we find that the probability that a majority of a district’s delegation aligns with the preferences of its constituents increases with (effective) district magnitude, consistent with the CJT. The CJT aggregation mechanism closely predicts delegation-constituency congruence only for effective, not nominal, district magnitude. Our results provide empirical evidence that the CJT applies to representative democracies. They also show how party discipline limits the advantages of larger districts.

We investigate whether physical attractiveness is associated with the behavior of elected politicians towards their voters, extending prior research that has focused on beauty's effects on electoral success. Leveraging the institutional features of Swiss politics, namely, mandatory disclosure of interest group affiliations and direct democracy allowing the identification of voter preferences, we link independent beauty ratings of Swiss politicians (provided by Australian participants unfamiliar with them) to two key behavioral outcomes: (i) the number of interest group affiliations and (ii) alignment with revealed voter preferences. We find that better-looking politicians are not more prone to “rent-seeking” through interest group affiliations. Moreover, better-looking politicians do not deviate more from their voters' preferences. These findings generally hold across the political spectrum, suggesting that in political systems with transparency regarding incumbents' behavior, there is little room for beauty-related advantages or disadvantages.

Sub-Saharan Africa is widely regarded as one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, yet large-scale evidence linking temperature exposure to individual-level welfare remains fragmented. In this paper, we provide a unified assessment of temperature exposure across multiple time horizons by linking daily, monthly, yearly, and long-run average temperature data to 168,585 geo-referenced households in 28 African countries. Our results consistently reveal a statistically robust negative association between higher temperatures and individual living standards, whether arising from short-term weather shocks or long-run climatic conditions. Quantitatively, these effects are modest, particularly once individual characteristics and local geographic conditions are accounted for. Notably, we find no substantive differences between impacts of short-term temperature and long-run climatic effects, suggesting limited past adaptation to sustained heat exposure. The fact that temperature-related welfare losses are differentially stronger among rural and agriculturally engaged households further highlights the persistent vulnerability of climate-sensitive livelihoods. Crucially, however, local infrastructural endowments emerge as an important moderating factor, significantly weakening the association between temperature exposure and individual-level deprivation. This finding points to scope for adaptation through investments in basic infrastructure and service provision.

How does district size affect the quality of political representation? We examine a mechanism derived from the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT), which predicts that larger legislative delegations more accurately reflect constituents' preferences when individual legislators vote independently. However, nominal seat counts often overstate the number of independent decision-makers, because party discipline causes legislators’ votes to be correlated. We introduce effective district size as a measure that more accurately captures the number of independent politicians within a constituency. Using 263 Swiss referenda (1992-2024) matched to parliamentary decisions, we provide evidence in line with the CJT: the probability that a majority of a delegation reflects its constituents' preferences increases with (effective) district size. Crucially, the CJT aggregation mechanism accurately predicts delegation-constituency congruence only for effective, not nominal, district size. These results provide empirical evidence that the CJT applies to representative democracies and highlight how party discipline constrains the representative benefits of larger district sizes. JEL Classification: D72 , K16 , H11

Effective science communication is crucial in informing citizens in times of crisis. The ICT-driven metamorphosis of the media industry (media-morphosis) has facilitated the shift from a rather one-directional information deficit model in science communication to a more bidirectional communication corresponding to a dialogue model. Little is known about the preferences for social media communication from the supply side of institutional and scholarly communication. Analyzing survey data from nearly 8,700 scientists, we compared their preferences for press media and social media, proxies of traditional centralized communication channels and modern decentralized channels, respectively. Our empirical results show that trust in governments and prioritizing access to all perspectives on the crisis are important factors that influence scientists’ preferences regarding forms of communication. Trust favors centralized systems, while social media serves as an alternative in contexts lacking trust in politics. Prioritizing the diffusion of different perspectives drives a shift to stated preferences for decentralized communication systems. We also show that scientists’ stated preferences for communication systems depend on the socio-political context.

This paper investigates the effect of mining activities on health care, income and water deprivations in Africa. By combining household data with mining locations, we conducted an econometric analysis to assess the impact of mining on self‐reported water security, health, and economic opportunities for 142,838 households. Our study utilizes the presence of active and inactive mines to measure the effects of household exposure to mining activities. We observe that proximity to active mining sites is associated with self‐reported improved water security, access to health, and economic opportunities. Instrumental variable estimates support a causal interpretation of our results. Specifically, households located within a 50 km radius of active mines reported a 4% lower probability of lacking clean water. Our findings also reveal that robust local institutions not only enhance water security but also mitigate the negative health impacts associated with mine closures. These results suggest that strengthening local governance can amplify the potential benefits of mining operations. Therefore, we recommend the strengthening of local government institutions to foster the resilience of vulnerable mining communities.

We identify women’s revealed preferences for legislative proposals to investigate substantive representation of women. We then examine whether female or male politicians in parliament are more responsive to revealed female preferences using data on 47,527 decisions made by all 777 Swiss parliamentarians between 1996 and 2022. Holding party and constituent preferences constant, our results show differences in the substantive representation of women between female and male politicians for legislative proposals related to social policies. For all policies unrelated to social issues, we find that female politicians are no more responsive to female preferences than male politicians. Heterogeneity analyses show that differences in the substantive representation of women by male and female politicians on social policy issues do not depend on the socialization of the politicians, or the underlying political incentives and constraints.

This article investigates the effect of women's schooling on fertility as well as on associated mechanisms by leveraging Burundi's free primary education policy (FPE) of 2005 as a natural experiment. Exogenous variation in schooling is identified through a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. Our results show that educational attainment was positively influenced by Burundi's FPE for women situated at all wealth levels. However, the relevant downstream effects of schooling-measured by fertility, literacy and work outcomes-reveal heterogenous treatment effects which are moderated by women's household wealth. While poor women profit in terms of increases in literacy (6.7 percentage-point increase for each year of policy-induced schooling), remunerated employment opportunities (5.7 percentage-point increase), as well as a reduction in desired and actual fertility outcomes (6.9 percentage-point reduction in teenage childbirth), none of these effects of additional education are observed for women from the wealthier households of our sample. The evidence of such a marked heterogeneity contributes to the growing literature examining the nexus between education and fertility in developing countries and helps to evaluate under which conditions the literature's findings may generalize.

We leverage the institutional framework in Switzerland to discern the revealed preferences of female and male voters for various legislative proposals. We examine whether female or male legislators’ votes in parliament are more congruent with women’s or men’s revealed preferences for identical legislative proposals. Our analysis of 47,527 matches between legislators and their voters reveals no significant difference in how closely female and male legislators match the preferences of women and men, particularly, when accounting for party affiliations. We conclude that female legislators do not demonstrate higher congruence with women’s preferences than their male counterparts in parliament.

This paper first introduces a theoretical formalization connecting a polity’s income level to terrorism. Our framework can accommodate different underlying assumptions about individual- and society-level grievances, yielding competing hypotheses. We then construct a panel database to study terrorism for 1527 subnational regions in 75 countries between 1970 and 2014. Results consistently imply an inverted U-shape that remains robust to incorporating a comprehensive set of region-level covariates, region- and time-fixed effects, as well as estimating an array of alternative specifications. The threat of terrorism systematically rises as low-income polities become richer, peaking at GDP/capita levels of ≈ US$12,800 (in constant 2005 PPP US$), but then falls consistently above that level. This pattern emerges for domestic and transnational terrorism alike. While peaks differ by perpetrator ideology, the inverted U shape also prevails across ideology-specific subsamples. In sum, alleviating poverty may first exacerbate terrorism, contrary to much of the proposed recipes advocated since 9/11.

We examine the effect of rising temperatures on regional economic development, using annual sub-national data for over 1500 regions in 152 countries between 1990 and 2017. In a panel setting with region- and country-year fixed effects, we find no evidence of a homogeneous or heterogeneous effect of rising temperatures on economic development as measured by regional per capita income. Additionally, we find no non-linear relationship between temperature and economic development. We also employ a long-difference approach that is attuned to exploring the long-run relationship between rising temperatures and regional income. Results indicate that rising temperatures have a negative long-run impact on regional per capita income for a minority of regions located in countries with weak economic, legal and political institutions. Furthermore, these vulnerable regions experience a decline in long-term population and human capital development. The use of alternative regional per capita GDP data from 1950 onwards yields similar empirical results. Our findings suggest that negative economic effects of temperature increase with time, only becoming apparent in the long run for regions in already disadvantaged countries. Thus, country-specific conditions may moderate regional economic vulnerability to future temperature increases due to global climate change.

Science has been an incredibly powerful and revolutionary force. However, it is not clear whether science is suited to performance under pressure; generally, science achieves best in its usual comfort zone of patience, caution, and slowness. But, if science is organized knowledge and acts as a guiding force for making informed decisions, it is important to understand how science and scientists perform as a reliable and valuable institution in a global crisis. This paper provides insights and reflections based on the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and from an analytical perspective. In particular, we analyze aspects such as speed, transparency, trust, data sharing, scientists in the political arena, and the psychology of scientists—all of which are areas inviting more detailed investigations by future studies conducting systematic empirical studies.

Abstract Ökonomen vertreten Kostenwahrheit im Sinne einer angemessenen Bepreisung negativer externer Effekte, weil sie die Handelungsträger motiviert, die von ihnen verursachten externen Effekte in ihrem wirtschaftlichen Handeln zu berücksichtigen. Aus politisch-ökonomischer Sicht ist Kostenwahrheit sogar noch wichtiger. Sie motiviert die politischen Handlungsträger die gesellschaftlichen Kosten ihres politischen Handelns zu berücksichtigen und die externen Kosten genauer zu erfassen als bei alternativen Politikmaßnahmen wie Geboten oder Verboten. Doch gerade wegen ihrer Vorteile setzt sich Kostenwahrheit im politischen Prozess selten vollständig durch. Denn sie verengt den Spielraum von Politikern, sich und den ihnen nahestehenden Interessengruppen wirtschaftliche und politische Renten zu verschaffen. Zugleich wird das Konzept der Kostenwahrheit missbraucht, um nur »Kostenscheinwahrheit« und neue Renten zu schaffen. Entscheidend ist daher, echte Kostenwahrheit durch geeignete institutionelle Regelungen abzusichern.

Cooking with relatively clean fuel has numerous benefits, including reducing pollution and improving health and socioeconomic outcomes. Hence, some developing countries have implemented policies to promote LPG use. However, risks of accidents and explosions may prevent risk-averse households from adopting LPG. This study examines the causal effect of risk aversion on the adoption and expenditure of LPG using the seventh round of the Ghana Living Standards Measurement Survey and a double hurdle approach. We find that risk-averse households are four per cent less likely to adopt LPG and, if adopted, spend significantly less on LPG. The result holds even after endogeneity has been addressed with diverse econometric strategies. However, the effect disappears in households where the primary decision-makers have no formal education, while it is systematically stronger when they are educated. The results imply measures that reduce the actual and perceived dangers of LPG usage could effectively increase adoption rates.

Using data from the World Values Survey, we show that individuals who speak a language in which the same word is used for both (financial) debt and (moral) guilt have a statistically significant and economically meaningful lower likelihood of borrowing money. This relationship holds even after controlling for a range of covariates, fixed effects, grammatical future tense reference, and the Germanic language family. Our results suggest that the synonymity of debt and guilt may be a hitherto overlooked aspect in explaining borrowing behaviour.

Women’s education and empowerment have engaged the interest of policymakers and academics for many years. We employ individual-level data from Ghana and Uganda in this paper to offer a comparative analysis of the impact of women’s education and empowerment on six household welfare indicators: child labor, child school enrollment, female labor force participation, fertility rate, household food expenditure, and nutrition intake. Comparing the two countries is insightful due to their distinct socio-economic structures and cultural contexts, which might influence the dynamics of women’s empowerment differently. The study utilizes the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Instrumental Variables (IV) regressions and provides a battery of robustness tests. The empirical results show that in a household, the woman’s and man’s education levels are significant determinants of household welfare. However, contrary to common assumptions, the woman’s education does not have a stronger effect than the man’s, and her relative bargaining position has negligible effects on the welfare indicators studied, at least for the cases of Ghana and Uganda. Further sensitivity checks support these findings, suggesting that female education can improve household welfare, but its impact may not necessarily operate through enhanced bargaining power within the household.

WiSt - Wirtschaftswissenschaftliches Studium , page 1 - 1

We analyze the effect of electoral turnout on incumbency advantages by exploring mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria. Mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the state government announced an official state of emergency. In the second ballot, voting in person was prohibited and only postal voting was possible. To construct an instrument for electoral turnout, we use a difference-in-differences strategy by contrasting turnout in the first and second ballot in 2020 with the first and second ballots from previous elections. We use this instrument to analyze the causal effect of turnout on incumbent vote shares. A 10-percentage point increase in turnout leads to a statistically robust 3.4 percentage point higher vote share for incumbent mayors highlighting the relevance of turnout-related incumbency advantages.