Abstract
I study how geopolitical concerns influence attitudes of a state toward its minorities. I exploit the Hitler rise to power in 1933 as an exogenous shock to Soviet-German relations. Using the digitized archival data on 2.7 million individual arrests by the Soviet secret police (NKVD), I apply difference-in-differences and synthetic control method to estimate how changing geopolitical relations influenced repressions of Germans in the USSR. Both models show that arrests of Germans relative to other minorities increased after 1933.
Presentation (Metropolis theme)
Abstract
I use the military march of Union general William Sherman during the American Civil War to estimate the effects of wartime violence and destruction on post-war voting and political outcomes. The results show small and insignificant effects of the march on Confederate monuments construction and lynchings. Only for voting outcomes I find borderline significant effects for some specifications. Specifically, the instrumental variable estimates imply that the march increased the Democratic party vote share by around 10 percentage point, however the estimated coefficients diminish over time. Overall, the results that Sherman's march suggest did not have a transformative impact on the politics in the South.
Final version for master thesis
Very preliminary Presentation