Betting on Hitler—The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany*

Ferguson, Thomas S.; Voth, Hans‐Joachim

doi:10.1162/qjec.2008.123.1.101

Cited by 374 publications

(248 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…To get a more precise measure of all dismissals I complement the information in the "List of Displaced German Scholars" with information from other sources. 9 The main additional source is the "Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933 -Vol. II : The arts, sciences, and literature".…”

Section: Data On Dismissed Scholarsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently other economists have analyzed aspects of the Nazi rise to power. Ferguson and Voth (2008), for example, show that …rms supporting the Nazi movement experienced unusually high stock-market returns in the …rst months of the Nazi regime. The …ndings of my paper may also lead to a better understanding of similar events which occurred in other countries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Peer Effects in Science: Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany

Waldinger

2011

The Review of Economic Studies

301

167

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This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are addressed by using the dismissal of scientists by the Nazi government as a source of exogenous variation in the peer group of scientists staying in Germany. Using a newly constructed panel dataset covering the universe of physicists, chemists, and mathematicians at all German universities from 1925 until 1938 I investigate peer effects at the local level and among co-authors. There is no evidence for localized peer effects, as neither department level (e.g. the physics department) nor specialization level (e.g. all theoretical physicists in the department) peers affect a researcher's productivity. Among co-authors, however, there is strong and significant evidence that peer quality affects a researcher's productivity. Loosing a co-author of average quality reduces the productivity of an average scientist by about 13 percent in physics and 16.5 percent in chemistry.

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Section: Data On Dismissed Scholarsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peer Effects in Science: Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany

Waldinger

2011

The Review of Economic Studies

301

167

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“…Since then, a number of studies have computed the economic advantages for firms' shareholders of being connected at the board level with politicians. For example, Ferguson and Voth (2008) show that firms connected to the Nazi party experienced positive abnormal returns associated to the rise of Hitler's party to the German government. 15 Elsewhere (see Bel and Trillas 2005) it has been suggested that corporate governance in large Spanish firms give a lot of discretion to managers, and that they may take advantage of this great discretion by sharing rents with politicians in exchange for favours to political parties, in the form of appointing party cronies, funding media empires or supporting particular policies.…”

Section: Testing the Impact Of Political Connectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of surprise political events on quoted firms: the March 2004 election in Spain

Castells

Trillas

2011

SERIEs

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In the last days of the electoral campaign for the 2004 general election in Spain, on Thursday March 11th 2004, a series of simultaneous terror attacks caused the death of 191 persons in commuting trains in the capital Madrid. Four days later, the opposition party won the election, against all predictions that were made prior to the terror attacks. This change in expectations presents a unique opportunity to take advantage of event study techniques to test some politico-economic hypotheses. The quantitative exercise is carried out employing Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR). Hypothesis testing is improved by means of bootstrapping techniques. Convergence theories prove quite resilient as, jointly, quoted firms were not significantly affected by the election outcome. The impact on politically connected companies and particular economic sectors, however, suggest that a combination of capture and agency problems may play a role in explaining the effects of the change in expectations.Keywords Event study · Median voter · Agency · Capture · Elections · Political connectionsWe thank Arnau Rovira (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) for excellent research assistance during this project. We acknowledge financial support from project ECO2010-20718.

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“…Fisman, 2001, Diermer et al, 2005, Ferguson and Voth, 2008, and Acemoglu et al 2010. We assume that access to such rents increases with membership in elite groups; for example, belonging to the same restricted club may facilitate connections between appointed politicians and entrepreneurs.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratization and Civic Capital

Guiso

Pinotti

2013

The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification

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We document a sharp reversal in electoral participation between the North and the South of Italy after the 1912 enfranchisement which extended voting rights from a limited élite to (almost) all adult males. When voting was restricted to the élite, electoral turnout was higher in the South but falls significantly below that in the North after the enfranchisement. Furthermore the new gap is never bridged over the following century and participation remains lower in the South despite the enrichment of democratic institutions and further extension of voting rights to the female population during the post war democratic republic. This pattern in the data is consistent with a simple model where individuals' voting in political elections is affected by private benefits and by civic duty, only elites can grab private benefits from participation in politics and civic culture differs across communities. We also find that extension of voting rights to non-elites results in a significant transfer of power to their political organizations only among populations with a high sense of civic duties. Together with the very persistent gap in participation between North and South our findings suggest that democratization -a process of concession of democratic rightscan benefit non-elites only when the latter have already a high sense of civic capital and is unlikely to be a viable avenue for inducing norms of civic behavior.Keywords: Democracy, culture, civic capital, institutions formation JEL: 2"If the democratic model of the participatory state is to develop in these new nations it will require more than the formal institutions of democracy -universal suffrage, the political party, the elective legislature. These in fact are also part of the totalitarian participation pattern, in a formal if not functional sense. A democratic form of participatory political system requires as well a political culture consistent with it."

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Betting on Hitler—The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany*

Cited by 374 publications

References 29 publications

Peer Effects in Science: Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany

Peer Effects in Science: Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany

The effects of surprise political events on quoted firms: the March 2004 election in Spain

Democratization and Civic Capital

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