Essays in economic history and political economy

Abstract

The first chapter examines the contact hypothesis in the context of 21st century Germany. I create a novel dataset linking election outcomes, migration, and labour market measures to test whether exposure to migrants affects voting for the AfD, democratic Germany’s first electorally successful right-wing populist party, in state, federal, and European elec tions in Germany between 2013 and 2021. I find a negative relationship between exposure to migrants and right-wing populist voting; a 1 percentage point increase in the share of migrants in the district population reduces the vote share for the AfD by .88 percentage points. Using a Bartik instrument for migration, I confirm this relationship. I further show evidence that this relationship di↵ers by local labour market outcomes. Using sur vey data, I find that this e↵ect is driven by reduction in prejudice; I rule out alternative mechanisms including migrant heterogeneity and voter turnout. The second chapter investigates the impact of economic empowerment on fertility. Using nine waves of US census data between 1850 and 1940 and two-way fixed e↵ect models, I show that women who grew up in states that granted women property rights had lower fertility on both the extensive and intensive margins during adulthood. For each additional year a woman lived in a state with property rights during her childhood, she had .011 fewer children and was .2 percentage points less likely to be a mother at all. These results remain robust to changes in the census waves, subgroups of the sample by age and race, and di↵erent measures of the outcome and treatment variables. I show that these results are likely driven by di↵erent marital outcomes for women who grew up with property rights; I rule out other potential mechanisms such as labour force participation, quality-quantity trade-o↵, and sex-specific stopping. The third chapter studies historical roots of skewed sex ratios. We construct novel data on female population shares by age, district, and religion in South Asia from 1881 to 1931. Sex ratios skew male in Northern India and are more balanced in Southern and Eastern India, including Burma. Male-biased sex ratios emerge most visibly after age 10, and this is not specific to any one region, religion, or time period. Sikhs have the most male-biased sex ratios, followed by Hindus, Muslims, and Jains. The female share correlates across religious groups within districts. Evidence that sex ratios correlate with suitability for wheat and rice is weaker than suggested by the existing literature