Names and behavior in a war Jurajda, Štěpán; Kovač, Dejan
Journal of population economics,
2021/1, Letnik:
34, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We implement a novel empirical strategy for measuring and studying a strong form of nationalism—the willingness to fight and die in a war for national independence—using name choices corresponding to ...a previous war leader. Based on data on almost half a million soldiers, we first show that having been given a first name that is synonymous with the leader(s) of the Croatian state during World War II predicts volunteering for service in the 1991–1995 Croatian war of independence and dying during the conflict. Next, we use the universe of Croatian birth certificates and the information about nationalism conveyed by first names to suggests that in ex-Yugoslav Croatia, nationalism rose continuously starting in the 1970s and that its rise was curbed in areas where concentration camps were located during WWII. Our evidence on intergenerational transmission of nationalism is consistent with nationalist fathers purposefully reflecting the trade-off between within-family and society-wide transmission channels of political values. We also link the nationalist values we proxy using first name choices to right-wing voting behavior in 2015, 20 years after the war.
This article uses a near-complete database of prisoners in the Theresienstadt Ghetto to provide statistical comparisons of death risks according to country of residence and gender, conditional on ...age, social status proxies, and the timing of the prisoners’ arrival in the ghetto. We also estimate conditional Holocaust survival differences for Theresienstadt prisoners on transports to Auschwitz. Our aim is to complement the existing historical research on Theresienstadt and to illustrate the possibilities of statistical analysis of the Holocaust in the present-day Czech Republic. To this end, we also discuss other available data.
Can staying minorities who evade ethnic cleansing affect political outcomes in resettled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia's ...Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left‐leaning antifascists. We study quasi‐experimental local variation in expulsion policies, a result of the surprising presence of the U.S. Army, which indirectly helped antifascist Germans stay. We find a long‐lasting footprint: Communist party support, party cells, and far‐left values are stronger today where antifascist Germans stayed in larger numbers. Postwar German Communist elites appear to be behind this effect along with the intergenerational transmission of values among active party members.
Based on 2016–20 hourly wage rates of McDonald’s basic crew and Big Mac prices collected simultaneously from almost all US McDonald’s, we find that in 25% of instances of minimum wage increases, ...restaurants keep constant their wage premium above the increasing minimum wage. Higher minimum wages are not associated with faster adoption of touch-screen ordering, and there is near-full price pass-through of minimum wages. Minimum wage hikes lead to increases in real wages (expressed as how many Big Macs 1 hour of basic crew work can buy) that are one-fifth lower than the corresponding increases in nominal wages.
Survivor testimonies link survival in deadly POW camps, Gulags, and Nazi concentration camps to the formation of close friendships with other prisoners. To provide evidence free of survival bias on ...the importance of social ties for surviving the Holocaust, we study individual histories of 30 thousand Jewish prisoners who entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on transports from the Theresienstadt ghetto. We ask whether the availability of potential friends among fellow prisoners on a transport influenced the chances of surviving the Holocaust. Relying on multiple proxies of preexisting social networks and varying social-linkage composition of transports, we uncover a significant survival advantage to entering Auschwitz with a larger group of potential friends.
Do women perform worse than equally able men in stressful competitive settings? We ask this question for competitions with a high payoff—admissions to tuition-free selective universities. With data ...on an entire cohort of Czech students graduating from secondary schools and applying to universities, we show that, compared to men of similar general skills and subject-of-study preferences, women perform similarly well when competition is less intense, but perform substantially worse (are less likely to be admitted) when applying to very selective universities.
We present a bibliometric comparison of publication performance in 226 scientific disciplines in the Web of Science (WoS) for six post-communist EU member states relative to six EU-15 countries of a ...comparable size. We compare not only overall country-level publication counts, but also high quality publication output where publication quality is inferred from the journal Article Influence Scores. As of 2010–2014, post-communist countries are still lagging far behind their EU counterparts, with the exception of a few scientific disciplines mainly in Slovenia. Moreover, research in post-communist countries tends to focus relatively more on quantity rather than quality. The relative publication performance of post-communist countries in the WoS is strongest in natural sciences and engineering. Future research is needed to reveal the underlying causes of these performance differences, which may include funding and productivity gaps, the historical legacy of the communist ideology, and Web of Science coverage differences.
We relate the firm-type structure of support from the main Czech kurzarbeit (short-work) program Antivirus B during the spring of2020 to the structure of the economy and to the structure of demand ...shocks approximated by declining hours worked. Evidence based on the Structure of Earnings Survey implies large participation gaps in favor of large employers, and disproportionately high intensity of use of the program by manufacturing companies, in particular those exhibiting declining wage bills already prior to the pandemic. Compared to other industries, manufacturing is thus able to 'cover' by kurzarbeit support the largest share of the decline in hours worked between the 2nd quarters of 2019 and 2020, with the exception of the hospitality and culture industries, which were most powerfully affected by pandemic lockdowns. Our analysis illustrates simple statistics available for real-time monitoring of kurzarbeit policies.
Compared to men, women, even financial professionals, exhibit higher risk aversion. We exploit random assignment of clients to banking advisors ('private bankers') in a large Czech bank to study the ...effects of advisor gender on the probability of mortgage issuance and on the probability that a newly issued mortgage is insured, which we interpret as corresponding to risk averse mortgage behaviour. Male advisors do not substantially affect the chances that their clients will take a new mortgage. However, the mortgages that they issue are dramatically less likely to be insured, particularly so for female clients who never had an insured loan with the bank.
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