Date:
Location:
Today's Speaker
Leander Heldring (Northwestern University), "Bureaucracy as a tool for Politicians: Evidence from Germany" (link to PDF)
Abstract
This paper studies the impact of a well-functioning bureaucracy on the effectiveness of repression, in the context of Germany’s Nazi regime. I compare former Prussian to non-Prussian municipalities within unified Germany in a regression discontinuity framework. When the Nazis persecuted the German Jews, Prussian areas implemented deportations of Jews more efficiently. During the Weimar republic, when Jews were legally protected, violence against Jews is lower in former Prussian areas. In both periods, Prussian local governments had greater ‘capacity’: They were more effective at raising taxes and collecting trash. Capacity derived from greater specialization and better information processing rather than from effort. Specialization may have created the moral wiggle room to implement repugnant directives.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
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All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.