Sascha O Becker
Biographic Data
| ID | 1032476 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sascha O Becker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sascha |
| FAMILY NAME | O Becker |
| SIGNATURE | BECKER S O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0672-4865 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 478 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Gender and religion
This paper surveys the literature on gender differences in religiosity and on how religion shapes gender-related economic and social outcomes. Part I examines why women tend to be more religious than men, reviewing leading explanations from sociology, economics, and psychology. Part II analyzes how religion affects gender norms and attitudes, education, labor market participation, fertility, health, legal institutions, and discrimination. Across …
Competing social influence in contested diffusion
The spread of radical institutional change does not often result from one-sided pro-innovation influence; countervailing influence networks in support of the status quo can suppress adoption. We develop a model of multiplex and competing network diffusion to describe how competing actors compete through multiple types of networks. Specifically, we hypothesize three types of contested diffusion: market competition, inoculation, and firefighting. T…
Religion and Growth
We use the elements of a macroeconomic production function—physical capital, human capital, labor, and technology—together with standard growth models to frame the role of religion in economic growth. Unifying a growing literature, we argue that religion can enhance or impinge upon economic growth through all four elements because it shapes individual preferences, societal norms, and institutions. Religion affects physical capital accumulation by…
More choice for men? Marriage patterns after World War II in Italy
We investigate how changes in the sex ratio induced by World War II affected the bargaining patterns of Italian men in the marriage market. Marriage data from the first wave of the Italian Household Longitudinal Survey (1997) are matched with newly digitized information on war casualties coming from the Italian National Bureau of Statistics. We find that men in post-war marriages were better off in terms of their spouse's education, this gain amo…
Forced displacement in history
Forced displacement as a consequence of wars, civil conflicts, or natural disasters does not only have contemporaneous consequences but also long‐run repercussions. This eclectic overview summarises some recent research on forced displacement in economic history. While many of the episodes covered refer to Europe, this survey points to literature across all continents. It highlights new developments, and points to gaps in the literature
Persecution, pogroms and genocide
Persecution, pogroms, and genocide have plagued humanity for centuries, costing millions of lives and haunting survivors. Economists and economic historians have recently made new contributions to the understanding of these phenomena. We provide a novel conceptual framework which highlights the inter-relationship between the intensity of persecution and migration patterns across dozens of historical episodes. Using this framework as a lens, we su…
Deutschland 1871
Kurz nach der Gründung des ersten deutschen Nationalstaats 1871 trat die deutsche Wirtschaft in die Ära des modernen Wirtschaftswachstums ein. Dennoch ist bisher kaum erforscht, ob und auf welche Weise die Nationalstaatsbildung die wirtschaftliche Dynamik beeinflusst hat. In diesem Band gehen zwanzig Autorinnen und Autoren diesen Zusammenhängen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven nach und ordnen sie in den europäischen Kontext ein. Somit wird ein …
The impact of public employment
This paper evaluates the impact of changes in public employment on private sector activity using the creation of the new West German government in Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic geography model in which public sector employment affects private sector employment through its impact on wages and house prices and also through potential producti…
Prussia disaggregated
We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live predominantly in towns. Villages and manors are substantially segregated by denomination, whereas towns are less segregated. Yet, we find relatively lower levels of se…
Forced Migration and Human Capital
We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a …
The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise
How did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policies? Contrary to the predominant and simplistic view that the system allowed the landed elites to capture most political rents, we find that members of parliament from constituencies with a higher vote inequality support more liberal policies, gauging their political orientation from the universe of roll call votes cast in parliament dur…
Multiplex Network Ties and the Spatial Diffusion of Radical Innovations
This article analyzes Martin Luther's role in spreading the early Reformation, one of the most important episodes of radical institutional change in the last millennium. We argue that social relations played a key role in its diffusion because the spread of heterodox ideologies and their eventual institutionalization relied not only on private "infection" through exposure to innovation but also on active conversion and promotion of that new faith…
The Separation and Reunification of Germany
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, Worl…
Who voted for Brexit? Individual and regional data combined
Previous analyses of the 2016 Brexit referendum used region-level data or small samples based on polling data. The former might be subject to ecological fallacy and the latter might suffer from small-sample bias. We use individual-level data on thousands of respondents in Understanding Society, the UK's largest household survey, which includes the EU referendum question. We find that voting Leave is associated with older age, white ethnicity, low…
Consequences of forced migration
The Impact of Public Employment
Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide
In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique microregional data set of 452 Prussian counties for 1816 to 1821 and 1869 to 1871, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental variable model finds tha…
Forced Migration and Human Capital
Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-level analysis
On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immigration and trade provides relatively little explanatory power for the referendum vote. Instead, we find that fundamental characteristics of the voting population were key drivers of the Vote Leave share, in particular their educat…
Causes and consequences of the Protestant Reformation
The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long‐Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy
Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the \nHabsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in \nlocal public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the \nlong-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. \nIdentifying from individuals living within a restricted band aro…
Ipehd—The ifo Prussian Economic History Database
This article describes the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a public use county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for nineteenth-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816–1901. These data provide a unique source for micro-regional empirical research in economic history, enabling analyses of education, religion, fertility, industrializatio…
Absorptive Capacity and the Growth and Investment Effects of Regional Transfers
Researchers often estimate average treatment effects of programs without investigating heterogeneity across units. Yet, individuals, firms, regions, or countries vary in their ability to utilize transfers. We analyze Objective 1 transfers of the EU to regions below a certain income level by way of a regression discontinuity design with systematically varying heterogeneous treatment effects. Only about 30 percent and 21 percent of the regions—thos…
A Gift is Not Always a Gift
We study gift exchange in a field experiment where a random subsample of participants in the Swiss Labour Force Survey received vouchers to be used in adult training. Actual voucher redemption can be traced, giving us the unique opportunity to study whether gift exchange in the form of participation in future rounds of the survey depends on the perceived usefulness of the gift. The group of voucher recipients as a whole has significantly higher r…
Too much of a good thing? On the growth effects of the EU's regional policy
Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from late 19th-century Prussia reveal that Protestantism was indeed associated not only with higher economic prosperity, but also with better education. We fi…
The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long‐Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy
Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the \nHabsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in \nlocal public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the \nlong-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. \nIdentifying from individuals living within a restricted band aro…
Consequences of forced migration
Causes and consequences of the Protestant Reformation
Multiplex Network Ties and the Spatial Diffusion of Radical Innovations
This article analyzes Martin Luther's role in spreading the early Reformation, one of the most important episodes of radical institutional change in the last millennium. We argue that social relations played a key role in its diffusion because the spread of heterodox ideologies and their eventual institutionalization relied not only on private "infection" through exposure to innovation but also on active conversion and promotion of that new faith…
The Separation and Reunification of Germany
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, Worl…
Youth emancipation and perceived job insecurity of parents and children
Ipehd—The ifo Prussian Economic History Database
This article describes the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a public use county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for nineteenth-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816–1901. These data provide a unique source for micro-regional empirical research in economic history, enabling analyses of education, religion, fertility, industrializatio…
Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence—mostly from British textile industries—however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia uses a unique school enrollment and factory employment database linking 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Usi…
The impact of public employment
This paper evaluates the impact of changes in public employment on private sector activity using the creation of the new West German government in Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic geography model in which public sector employment affects private sector employment through its impact on wages and house prices and also through potential producti…
The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise
How did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policies? Contrary to the predominant and simplistic view that the system allowed the landed elites to capture most political rents, we find that members of parliament from constituencies with a higher vote inequality support more liberal policies, gauging their political orientation from the universe of roll call votes cast in parliament dur…
Persecution, pogroms and genocide
Persecution, pogroms, and genocide have plagued humanity for centuries, costing millions of lives and haunting survivors. Economists and economic historians have recently made new contributions to the understanding of these phenomena. We provide a novel conceptual framework which highlights the inter-relationship between the intensity of persecution and migration patterns across dozens of historical episodes. Using this framework as a lens, we su…
Estimation of Average Treatment Effects Based on Propensity Scores
In this paper, we give a short overview of some propensity score matching estimators suggested in the evaluation literature, and we provide a set of Stata programs, which we illustrate using the National Supported Work (NSW) demonstration widely known in labor economics.
Sensitivity Analysis for Average Treatment Effects
Based on the conditional independence or unconfoundedness assumption, matching has become a popular approach to estimate average treatment effects. Checking the sensitivity of the estimated results with respect to deviations from this identifying assumption has become an increasingly important topic in the applied evaluation literature. If there are unobserved variables that affect assignment into treatment and the outcome variable simultaneously…
Youth emancipation and perceived job insecurity of parents and children
Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from late 19th-century Prussia reveal that Protestantism was indeed associated not only with higher economic prosperity, but also with better education. We fi…
The trade-off between fertility and education
Going Nuts
Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence—mostly from British textile industries—however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia uses a unique school enrollment and factory employment database linking 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Usi…
Too much of a good thing? On the growth effects of the EU's regional policy
The effect of investment in children’s education on fertility in 1816 Prussia
Absorptive Capacity and the Growth and Investment Effects of Regional Transfers
Researchers often estimate average treatment effects of programs without investigating heterogeneity across units. Yet, individuals, firms, regions, or countries vary in their ability to utilize transfers. We analyze Objective 1 transfers of the EU to regions below a certain income level by way of a regression discontinuity design with systematically varying heterogeneous treatment effects. Only about 30 percent and 21 percent of the regions—thos…
A Gift is Not Always a Gift
We study gift exchange in a field experiment where a random subsample of participants in the Swiss Labour Force Survey received vouchers to be used in adult training. Actual voucher redemption can be traced, giving us the unique opportunity to study whether gift exchange in the form of participation in future rounds of the survey depends on the perceived usefulness of the gift. The group of voucher recipients as a whole has significantly higher r…
Ipehd—The ifo Prussian Economic History Database
This article describes the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a public use county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for nineteenth-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816–1901. These data provide a unique source for micro-regional empirical research in economic history, enabling analyses of education, religion, fertility, industrializatio…
Causes and consequences of the Protestant Reformation
The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long‐Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy
Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the \nHabsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in \nlocal public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the \nlong-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. \nIdentifying from individuals living within a restricted band aro…
Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-level analysis
On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immigration and trade provides relatively little explanatory power for the referendum vote. Instead, we find that fundamental characteristics of the voting population were key drivers of the Vote Leave share, in particular their educat…
The Impact of Public Employment
Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide
In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique microregional data set of 452 Prussian counties for 1816 to 1821 and 1869 to 1871, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental variable model finds tha…
Forced Migration and Human Capital
Who voted for Brexit? Individual and regional data combined
Previous analyses of the 2016 Brexit referendum used region-level data or small samples based on polling data. The former might be subject to ecological fallacy and the latter might suffer from small-sample bias. We use individual-level data on thousands of respondents in Understanding Society, the UK's largest household survey, which includes the EU referendum question. We find that voting Leave is associated with older age, white ethnicity, low…
Consequences of forced migration
Prussia disaggregated
We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live predominantly in towns. Villages and manors are substantially segregated by denomination, whereas towns are less segregated. Yet, we find relatively lower levels of se…
Forced Migration and Human Capital
We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a …
The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise
How did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policies? Contrary to the predominant and simplistic view that the system allowed the landed elites to capture most political rents, we find that members of parliament from constituencies with a higher vote inequality support more liberal policies, gauging their political orientation from the universe of roll call votes cast in parliament dur…
Multiplex Network Ties and the Spatial Diffusion of Radical Innovations
This article analyzes Martin Luther's role in spreading the early Reformation, one of the most important episodes of radical institutional change in the last millennium. We argue that social relations played a key role in its diffusion because the spread of heterodox ideologies and their eventual institutionalization relied not only on private "infection" through exposure to innovation but also on active conversion and promotion of that new faith…
The Separation and Reunification of Germany
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, Worl…
Economics (21 works) · Political science (18 works) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (17 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Demographic economics (11 works) · Demography (10 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (10 works) · Population (9 works) · Geography (8 works)