Christian Dippel

• Dippel, C.; Poyker, M., 2023, "Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing?", The Journal of Law and Economics, August 66(3): 511 - 534.
  Abstract: AbstractUsing a newly constructed complete monthly panel of private and public state prisons, we ask whether the presence of private prisons impacts state judges? sentencing decisions. We employ two identification strategies: a difference-in-differences strategy that compares only court pairs that straddle state borders and an event study using the full data. We find that the opening of a private prison has a small but statistically significant and robust effect on sentence length, while the opening of a public prison does not. The effect is entirely driven by changes in sentencing in the first 2 months after prison openings. The combined evidence appears inconsistent with the hypothesis that private prisons may directly influence judges; instead, a simple salience explanation may be the most plausible.

  Link(s) to publication:

  https://doi.org/10.1086/724800

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/724800

• Dippel, C.; Frye, D.; Leonard, B., (Forthcoming), "Bureaucratic discretion in policy implementation: evidence from the Allotment Era", Public Choice
  Abstract: From 1887 to 1934, the federal government broke up millions of acres of tribally owned reservation lands and allotted them to individual Native American households. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ local “Indian agents” oversaw this highly contingent conveyance of property rights. They initially managed the allotted land held in trust, and then later decided when and if to re-title it to fee simple. Building on and going beyond the literature showing that bureaucratic incentives matter greatly for policy implementation, our paper studies empirically to what extent individual agents’ idiosyncratic preferences and discretion shaped this process. We find that individual agents were statistically important drivers of policy implementation, introducing an element of historical randomness into the legacy of allotment, which continues to shape the distribution of land titles on reservations to the present day.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11127-022-01019-8

• Dippel, C., 2022, "Political Parties Do Matter in U.S. Cities ... For Their Unfunded Pensions", American Economic Journal-Economic Policy, August 14(3): 1 - 23.
  Abstract: This paper studies public sector pension obligations, the biggest fiscal challenge currently facing many US cities. Employing a regression discontinuity design around close elections, benefit payments out of a city's public sector pensions are shown to grow faster under Democratic party mayors, while contributions into the pensions do not. Previous research showed that parties do not matter for a wide range of cities' fiscal expenditures and explained this with voters imposing fiscal discipline. This paper replicates previous results but shows that parties can matter for shrouded expenditure types that voters do not pay attention to, especially if they benefit well-organized interest groups.

  Link(s) to publication:

  https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190480

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/pol.20190480

• Dippel, C.; Gold, R.; Heblich, S.; Pinto, R., 2022, "The Effect of Trade on Workers and Voters", The Economic Journal, January 132(641): 199 - 217.
  Abstract: We investigate economic causes of the rising support of populist parties in industrialized countries. Looking at Germany, we find that exposure to imports from low wage countries increases the support for nationalist parties between 1987–2009, while increasing exports have the opposite effect. The net effect translates into increasing support of the right-populist AfD after its emergence in 2013. Individual data from the German Socioeconomic Panel reveal that low-skilled manufacturing workers’ political preferences are most responsive to trade exposure. Using a novel approach to causal mediation analysis, we identify trade-induced labor market adjustments as economic mechanism causing the voting response to international trade.

  Link(s) to publication:

  https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/641/199/6274674

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueab041

• Dippel, C.; Poyker, M., 2021, "Rules versus norms: How formal and informal institutions shape judicial sentencing cycles", Journal of Comparative Economics, September 49(3): 645 - 659.
  Abstract: Existing research on electoral sentencing cycles consistently finds that elected judges levy longer sentences when they are up for re-election. However, this research finding had previously drawn exclusively on data from four states. Using newly collected sentencing data on seven additional states, we find substantial, and previously un-noted, heterogeneity in the strength of sentencing cycles. This heterogeneity appears to be explained by cross-state differences in informal norm of whether incumbent judges get challenged in judicial elections. We show that variation is explain by the baseline probability of having a challenger and the number of donations per electoral race. That variation, in turn, is not well explained by observable formal electoral institutions.

  Link(s) to publication:

  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596721000159

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2021.02.003

• Dippel, C.; Leonard, B., 2021, "Not-so-Natural Experiments in History", Journal of Historical Political Economy, June 1(1): 1 - 30.
  Abstract: This paper compares the role of cliometrics — broadly defined to include economics, political science, and other social sciences — before and after the "credibility revolution" of the late 1990s. The contributions of cliometrics that led to the 1993 Nobel Prize were due primarily to a combination of quantification and economic theory with in-depth historical knowledge. After the credibility revolution, much of cliometrics shifted toward "natural experiments," especially in papers published in general-interest journals. We argue that this shift comes with certain trade-offs between statistical and contextual evidence, and that the refereeing process currently makes these trade-offs steeper in historical settings than in other observational-data settings. We also argue, however, that historical settings offer particularly actionable ways of flattening these trade-offs to ensure the "clio" in cliometrics stays alive and well.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/115.00000001

• Dippel, C.; Feir, D.; Leonard, B.; Roark, M., 2021, "Secured Transactions Laws and Economic Development on American Indian Reservations", AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 111: 248 - 252.
  Abstract: Harmonized commercial laws are considered an essential ingredient to commerce and trade and have been called the backbone of American commerce. Key components of these laws are those governing secured transactions. In recent years, Native American tribal governments have moved to adopt commercial codes to increase economic development on their reservations, but many have modified these codes to address challenges to tribal sovereignty and culture. This paper compares reservations that adopted modified secured transaction acts to reservations that adopted uniform laws. We demonstrate that reservations can potentially experience substantial economic gains from either form of adoption.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20211102

• Dippel, C.; Heblich, S., 2021, "Leadership in Social Movements: Evidence from the “Forty-Eighters” in the Civil War", American Economic Review, February 111(2): 472 - 505.
  Abstract: This paper studies the role of leaders in the social movement against slavery that culminated in the US Civil War. Our analysis is organized around a natural experiment: leaders of the failed German revolution of 1848–1849 were expelled to the United States and became antislavery campaigners who helped mobilize Union Army volunteers. Towns where Forty-Eighters settled show two-thirds higher Union Army enlistments. Their influence worked through local newspapers and social clubs. Going beyond enlistment decisions, Forty-Eighters reduced their companies’ desertion rate during the war. In the long run, Forty-Eighter towns were more likely to form a local chapter of the NAACP. (JEL D74, J15, J45, J61, N31, N41)

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.20191137

• Carvalho, J-P.; Dippel, C., 2020, "Elite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands", The Economic Journal, October 130(631): 1995 - 2029.
  Abstract: Emancipation of slaves in the 1830s transformed the political elites of the British Caribbean plantation islands. New elites were more accountable to the citizenry. We develop a theory in which two factors limit and possibly reverse the effect of this on political outcomes, with legislators: (i) ‘stepping up’ to pass extractive policies; and/or (ii) weakening democratic institutions. The theory is supported by an historical analysis of ten Caribbean plantation islands, based on original archival data on legislator race, occupation and roll-call voting. Eventually, all assemblies that experienced a significant change in composition dissolved themselves and converted to British ‘Crown Rule’.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaa018

• Dippel, C.; Ferrara, A.; Heblich, S., 2020, "Causal mediation analysis in instrumental-variables regressions", The Stata Journal, September 20(3): 613 - 626.
  Abstract: In this article, we describe the use of ivmediate, a new command to estimate causal mediation effects in instrumental-variables settings using the framework developed by Dippel et al. (2020, unpublished manuscript). ivmediate allows estimation of a treatment effect and the share of this effect that can be attributed to a mediator variable. While both treatment and mediator can be potentially endogenous, a single instrument suffices to identify both the causal treatment and the mediation effects.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1536867x20953572

• Dippel, C.; Greif, A.; Trefler, D., 2020, "Outside Options, Coercion, and Wages: Removing the Sugar Coating", The Economic Journal, August 130(630): 1678 - 1714.
  Abstract: In economies with a large informal sector firms can increase profits by reducing workers’ outside options in that informal sector. We formalise this idea in a simple model of an agricultural economy with plantation owners who lobby the government to enact coercive policies—e.g., the eviction and incarceration of squatting smallhold farmers—that reduce the value to working outside the formal sector. Using unique data for 14 British West Indies ‘sugar islands’ from 1838 (the year of slave emancipation) until 1913, we examine the impact of plantation owners’ power on wages and coercion-related incarceration. To gain identification, we utilise exogenous variation in the strength of the plantation system in the different islands over time. Where planter power declined we see that incarceration rates dropped, and agricultural wages rose, accompanied by a decline in formal agricultural employment.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaa030

• Dippel, C., 2015, "Foreign aid and voting in international organizations: Evidence from the IWC", JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS, December 132: 1 - 12.
  Abstract: I use a unique dispute between major aid donors in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to investigate whether donor nations change their aid giving in response to changes in aid recipients' voting behavior inside international organizations (IOs). This relationship is difficult to pin down in most IOs because agenda items constantly change and donor coalitions fluctuate with them. I exploit the fact that the IWC has, on the one hand, seen two fixed aid donor blocs opposing each other for three decades over a single issue, but has on the other hand seen rich variation in both membership and voting behavior of aid recipient countries. Using an identification strategy that relates changes in bilateral aid to within-recipient variation in IWC voting-bloc affiliation and fixed cross-sectional variation in donors' voting bloc, the evidence suggests that Japan rewards joining the pro-whaling bloc, and that countries who recently experienced aid reductions from the three big anti-whaling donors – the U.S., the U.K., and France – are more likely to join the pro-whaling bloc.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.08.012

• Dippel, C., 2014, "Forced Coexistence and Economic Development: Evidence From Native American Reservations", ECONOMETRICA, November 82(6): 2131 - 2165.
  Abstract: Studying Native American reservations, and their historical formation, I find that their forced integration of autonomous polities into a system of shared governance had large negative long-run consequences, even though the affected people were ethnically and linguistically homogenous. Reservations that combined multiple sub-tribal bands when they were formed are 30% poorer today, even when conditioning on pre-reservation political traditions. The results hold with tribe fixed effects, identifying only off within-tribe variation across reservations. I also provide estimates from an instrumental variable strategy based on historical mining rushes that led to exogenously more centralized reservations. Data on the timing of economic divergence and on contemporary political conflict suggest that the primary mechanism runs from persistent social divisions through the quality of local governance to the local economic environment.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.3982/ecta11423

• Dippel, C., 2013, "Essays in International Political Economy", JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, June 73(2): 537 - 540.
  Abstract: My dissertation studies three important questions in international political economy: The long-run consequences of social divisions, the endogenous evolution of institutions, and how coercive labor market institutions determine the distribution of the gains from trade.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022050713000363

• Dippel, C., 2012, "Groseclose and Snyder in finite legislatures", JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL POLITICS, April 24(2): 265 - 273.
  Abstract: The Groseclose and Snyder (1996) model is one of the best-known models of vote buying in legislatures. Although the logic of the model is compelling, it is not clear that its key propositions, derived in a continuous set-up, hold in finite legislatures. This is an important issue because many real-world legislatures are small and should be modeled as finite in order to make predictions on coalition formation in them. This paper makes two contributions. The main one is to show with full generality that the key propositions in the Groseclose and Snyder model do carry through into finite legislatures. Secondly, it clarifies the role that parameter restrictions played in previous work on this question by Banks (2000) which was not fully general.

  Link(s) to publication:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0951629811423092

For more publications please see our Research Database