We provide evidence that citizenship catalyzes the long-term economic integration of immigrants. Despite the relevance of citizenship policy to immigrant integration, we lack a reliable understanding of the economic consequences of acquiring citizenship. To overcome nonrandom selection into naturalization, we exploit the quasi-random assignment of citizenship in Swiss municipalities that held referendums to decide the outcome of individual naturalization applications. Our data combine individual-level referendum results with detailed social security records from the Swiss authorities. This approach allows us to compare the long-term earnings of otherwise similar immigrants who barely won or lost their referendum. We find that winning Swiss citizenship in the referendum increased annual earnings by an average of approximately 5000 U.S. dollars over the subsequent 15 years. This effect is concentrated among more marginalized immigrants.

We provide an equilibrium analysis of the efficiency properties of simultaneous bilateral tariff negotiations in a three-country model of international trade. We consider the setting in which discriminatory tariffs are allowed, and we utilize the “Nash-in-Nash” solution concept of Horn and Wolinsky (1988). We allow for a general family of political-economic country welfare functions and assess efficiency relative to these welfare functions. We establish a sense in which the resulting tariffs are inefficient and too low, so that excessive liberalization occurs from the perspective of the three countries.

What explains the sharp divide in European public attitudes toward Grexit? We explore this question using original surveys from four of the largest European economies. We contend that differences in economic self-interest, and the often-mentioned chasm between supporters of mainstream and extremist parties, provide little insight into the public divide over Grexit. Instead, we show that the key factor is the split between the left and the right. We then develop and test a set of theoretical explanations for the prominence of this cleavage. We find that the left-right divide over Grexit is not driven by differences in attitudes on redistribution, levels of empathy, or general European Union support. Instead, left and right voters seem to have different expectations about how a default and exit of a currency-union member would affect the European economy. These expectations likely reflect differences in core beliefs about the consequences of a free-market approach.

A growing number of countries have established programs to attract immigrants who can contribute to their economy. Research suggests that an immigrant's initial arrival location plays a key role in shaping their economic success. Yet immigrants currently lack access to personalized information that would help them identify optimal destinations. Instead, they often rely on availability heuristics, which can lead to the selection of sub-optimal landing locations, lower earnings, elevated outmigration rates, and concentration in the most well-known locations. To address this issue and counteract the effects of cognitive biases and limited information, we propose a data-driven decision helper that draws on behavioral insights, administrative data, and machine learning methods to inform immigrants' location decisions. The decision helper provides personalized location recommendations that reflect immigrants' preferences as well as data-driven predictions of the locations where they maximize their expected earnings given their profile. We illustrate the potential impact of our approach using backtests conducted with administrative data that links landing data of recent economic immigrants from Canada's Express Entry system with their earnings retrieved from tax records. Simulations across various scenarios suggest that providing location recommendations to incoming economic immigrants can increase their initial earnings and lead to a mild shift away from the most populous landing destinations. Our approach can be implemented within existing institutional structures at minimal cost, and offers governments an opportunity to harness their administrative data to improve outcomes for economic immigrants.

This paper empirically examines recently declassified tariff bargaining data from the GATT/WTO. Focusing on the Torquay Round (1950–1951), we document stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations that suggest a lack of strategic behavior among the participating governments and an important multilateral element to the bilateral bargains. We suggest that these features can be understood as emerging from a tariff bargaining forum that emphasizes the GATT pillars of MFN and multilateral reciprocity, and we offer evidence that the relaxation of strict bilateral reciprocity facilitated by the GATT multilateral bargaining forum was important to the success of the GATT approach.

Where does the state come from? Two canonical answers have been interstate wars and contracts between rulers and the ruled in the early modern period. New scholarship has pushed back the historical origins of the European state to the Middle Ages, and focused on domestic institutions such as parliaments, universities, the law, inheritance rules, and cities. It has left open questions of the causes of territorial fragmentation, the structural similarities in state administrations, and the policy preoccupations of the state. One answer is a powerful but neglected force in state formation: the medieval Church, which served as a rival for sovereignty, and a template for institutional innovations in court administrations, the law, and the formation of human capital. Church influence further helps to explain why territorial fragmentation in the Middle Ages persisted, why royal courts adopted similar administrative solutions, and why secular states remain concerned with morality and social discipline.

The problem of low naturalization rates in the United States has entered policymakers’ agendas in light of the societal gains associated with citizenship and an increasing number of foreign-born residents. Nevertheless, there is little evidence on what policy interventions work best to increase naturalization rates. In this research, we show that the standardization of the fee waiver for citizenship applications in 2010 raised naturalization rates among low-income immigrants. These gains were particularly sizable among those immigrants who typically face higher hurdles to accessing citizenship. These findings have implications for policymakers interested in designing policies that help disadvantaged immigrant groups overcome barriers to citizenship.

In the 1880s, Europeans descended on Africa and grabbed vast swaths of the continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Rogue Empires follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa. Many of them were would-be kings who sought to establish their own autonomous empires across the African continent—often at odds with traditional European governments which competed for control.

From 1882 to 1885, independent European businessmen and firms (many of doubtful legitimacy) produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. Steven Press traces the notion of empire by purchase to an unlikely place: the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, where the English adventurer James Brooke bought his own kingdom in the 1840s. Brooke’s example inspired imitators in Africa, as speculators exploited a loophole in international law in order to assert sovereignty and legal ownership of lands which they then plundered for profit.

The success of these experiments in governance attracted notice in European capitals. Press shows how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when King Leopold of Belgium and the German Chancellor Bismarck embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas in the Congo, Namibia, and Cameroon.