Volume 22, Issue 3

We investigate the regional distribution of the COVID-19 outbreak in Germany. We use a novel digital mobility dataset, that traces the undertaken trips on Easter Sunday 2020 and instrument them with regional accessibility as measured by the regional road infrastructure of Germany’s 401 NUTS III regions. We identify a robust negative association between the number of infected cases per capita and average travel time on roads to the next major urban center. What has been a hinderance for economic performance in good economic times, appears to be a benevolent factor in the COVID-19 pandemic: bad road infrastructure. Using road infrastructure as an instrument for mobility reductions we assess the causal effect of mobility reductions on infections. The study shows that keeping mobility of people low is a main factor to reduce infections. Aggregating over all regions, our results suggest that there would have been about 55,600 infections less on May 5th, 2020, if mobility at the onset of the disease were 10 percent lower.

What effect did trade have on the size distribution of firms during the first wave of globalization? Three historical datasets from the German Empire between 1875 and 1907 were collected and harmonized to answer this question. This paper combines industry census and bilateral railway trade data from the same industry and region along with industry-level tariff data. The evidence shows that increases in aggregate trade caused the share of firms to shift from smaller to larger firms. Exogenous decreases in tariffs caused an increase in the share of the largest firms. The regional distributive effects of trade on inequality between firms that are discussed in the contemporaneous literature were already present during the first wave globalization.

We study the effect of the electoral system (single-ballot vs runoff) on the quality of politicians, measured by the average educational attainment, at the local level in Italy over the period 1994–2017. By exploiting the discontinuous voting rule shift nearby the 15,000 population cut-off, we have implemented a RDD and found that the change in the electoral scheme leads to an overall downward variation in the educational attainment of local politicians by about 2 % compared to years of schooling of politicians in municipalities just below the cut-off. Findings are similar when we separately focus on the educational attainment of mayors and councilors, and when we use alternative measures of quality of politicians related both to the previous occupation and to previous political experience. However, different confounding policies related to the voting scheme change at the cut-off. We show that the negative effect is not directly related to the way politicians are elected (runoff vs single-ballot scheme) but to the number of lists supporting the mayoral candidates: in municipalities below 15,000 inhabitants candidates running for mayor are supported only by one single list, whereas above the cut-off mayoral candidates might be supported by more lists. Overall, we speculate that the negative impact produced by the treatment on the educational attainment of local politicians is explained by the different selection process of candidates adopted by political parties, rather than by voters’ preferences toward low-skilled politicians.

Trade elasticities are a crucial variable for research on international trade. Caliendo and Parro (2015) provide a novel method to estimate trade elasticities which is based on odds ratio triplets calculated from structural gravity equations. We find that these odds ratios can be set up not only as triplets, but also e. g. as quadruplets (quads) and quintuples (quints). We estimate trade elasticities from triplets, quads and quints for the two digit level of ISIC Rev.3. The corresponding estimates show certain differences, but the results are generally robust. Because the different odds ratios are all theoretically validated, we suggest using them for checking robustness. Benefits could also arise because larger odds ratios might be able to provide more reliable estimates.