Scholar

Stefan Bauernschuster

H-index: 16
Economics 24%
Political science 22%
woessmann.bsky.social
🚨 Thrilled that our 🆕 paper
“Age and Cognitive Skills: Use It or Lose It”
just came out in #ScienceAdvances @science.org

💡 Longitudinal evidence: age pattern of literacy+numeracy not as bleak as cross-section suggests + strongly differs by skill usage

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

🧵A thread
1/7
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Mechanisms II: Why was SPD believed to have expertise in public health? In contrast to other parties, SPD and its predecessors explicitly addressed health policy in party programs; SPD particularly concerned with health of workers; SPD strongly involved in health insurance system
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Mechanisms I: Not driven by populist and extremist parties; no evidence for punishing/rewarding incumbents; no by-product of dismal economic conditions after World War I. Results in line with issue ownership theory: voters reward competence in salient issues.
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Validity & robustness checks: Parallel pre-trends ✅; city-level analysis: effect driven by deaths due to respiratory diseases ✅; robust to controlling for large set of covariates, incl., e.g., pre-War poverty, inequality, other mortality phenomena during World War I.✅
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
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.
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
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.
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Background II: Still, since the pandemic killed around 400,000 people and public life was altered due to widespread sick leaves, the Spanish Flu was arguably salient to voters when elections were held in January 1919, just a month after the 2nd wave had flattened.
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Background I: The deadly 2nd wave of the Spanish flu hit Germany in late 1918 during the crucial phase of World War I. As authorities did not want to raise concerns of the people, they rejected any interventions and did little to limit the spread of influenza
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Take-home result: Excess mortality due to the Spanish Flu resulted in a lasting shift of votes towards left-wing parties in the Weimar Republic. Extremists could not benefit from pandemic. Mechanism: As public health became a salient issue, voters rewarded expertise in this issue
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Thank you @danielkuehnle.bsky.social for inviting me to present my paper „The impact of Margaret Sanger‘s birth control clinics on early 20th century US fertility and mortality“ @unidue.bsky.social.
Super nice crowd, great comments - highly recommend!

www.wiwi.uni-passau.de/fileadmin/do...
www.wiwi.uni-passau.de
unipassauresearch.bsky.social
German magazine @wirtschaftswoche.bsky.social has named a professor from our university as the most prolific young business economist in Germany - congratulations, Professor #MarcGoerigk 👏🙌 Learn more about his research and why he finds the abstract more beautiful than concrete problems:
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Memories of a great conference #eale2024 in Bergen 🇳🇴
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Hier ist ein spannendes Papier, das zeigt, dass fest installierte Blitzer wirken, aber nur sehr lokal (Umkreis 500 Meter): www.dropbox.com/s/rupfe4rxqz...
www.dropbox.com
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
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.
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Looking forward to the annual meeting of the German Economic Association in Regensburg, in particular to seeing many new faces. Please, dear doctoral students, approach us „old“ professors - this is what conferences are made for!
sbauernschuster.bsky.social
Starting here with a few holiday pictures from Sardegna. May attract more people than my research.

References

Fields & subjects

Updated 1m