Using 45M+ women from the 1920–40 census plus county-level birth/death data, and exploiting the staggered rollout of clinics for causal identification, we find that Sanger clinics: 📉 Explain 5–6.5% of the US fertility decline (1920–40) 👶 Reduced stillbirths by 3–6% 👶 Reduced infant mortality by 3.5%

In the early 1900s, Comstock Laws banned contraception in the US. Sanger illegally opened clinics where trained doctors fitted diaphragms and taught women how to use them — the first real access point for female-controlled birth control at the time.

🎉 Thrilled to share our paper on Margaret Sanger's birth control clinics has been accepted at AEJ: Economic Policy! With Michael Grimm & Cathy Hajo — 6 years in the making. Here's what we found 🧵

In our new research paper (joint work with Leander Andres, Gordon B. Dahl, Helmut Rainer, and Simone Schueller), we show that birthright citizenship substantially declines youth crime of children born to migrant families. Here are more details of the study design, data, results, and mechanisms:

Effect size: Moving from a constituency at the 25th percentile of mortality to a constituency at the 75th percentile of the mortality distribution increased the left-wing vote share by 2.1 percentage points or 12.4 percent of a standard deviation. Effect is persistent.

Method and data: We exploit a panel of voting results containing 14 elections from 1893 to 1933 across all 362 constituencies of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic in a difference-in-differences design and combine this panel with a measure of Spanish flu mortality in 1918.

🚨PUBLICATION ALERT The #SpanishFlu was one of the deadliest pandemics in history. How did it affect elections in the Weimar Republic? w/ Matthias Blum, Christoph Koenig & @hornungerik.bsky.social @econtribute.bsky.social Now published in Explorations in Economic History: doi.org/10.1016/j.ee...

Memories of a great conference #eale2024 in Bergen 🇳🇴

Today was a rather productive day

Toronto ❤️ Thank you for great discussions, Shari Eli, Michael Baker, Tianyi Wang, David Nagy, Devin Bissky Dziadyk and Stephan Heblich! Now preparing for the Urban Economics Association conference.

Starting here with a few holiday pictures from Sardegna. May attract more people than my research.