Today, rising economic inequality, ecological degradation, and the erosion of democracy have plunged Western values into a deep crisis. The normative force of modern ideals - universal human rights, progress, justice - proves ineffective against xenophobia, genocide, and the climate crisis. The...

We compare inequality and social mobility trends in European countries We compare inequality and social mobility trends in European countries exposed to Soviet Communist (SC) regimes with those not exposed, using similar welfare mea-sures. We draw upon a rich retrospective dataset that collects...

We compare inequality and social mobility trends in European countries exposed to Soviet Communist (SC) regimes with those not exposed, using similar welfare mea-sures. We draw upon a rich retrospective dataset that collects relevant welfare measures across regimes, including information on...

Why did the socialist system that dominated Eastern European countries for much of the 20th century collapse around 1990? Drawing on the newly released wiiw COMECON Dataset and reports that the wiiw was publishing at that time, we explore whether the collapse was due to unfixable systemic flaws...

Does exposure to violence create more politically engaged citizens? In a PNAS paper, Barceló (2021) asks this provocative question and proposes an intricate and original socio-psychological theory to answer it. Barceló also employs a research design that seeks to account for reverse causality...

We show that exposure to anti-capitalist ideology can exert a lasting influence on attitudes towards capital markets and stock-market participation. Utilizing novel survey, bank, and broker data, we document that, decades after Germany's reunification, East Germans invest significantly less in...