Published and accepted arcticles

1.) T. Krieger (2024). Measuring Democracy. Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice (forthcoming) [Link to working paper]

This short article contributes to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice by summarizing the literature on the measurement of democracy. I proceed in two step. In the first part, I describe the classical approach for producing a measure of democracy and sketch an alternative approach.The second part provides an overview about existing democracy index.

2.) T. Krieger (2023). Elites and health infrastructure improvements in industrializing regimes. Journal of Economic Growth, forthcoming [Link]

We collect information about more than 5,000 Prussian politicians, digitize administrative data on the provision of heatlh-promoting public goods, and gather local-level information on workers' movements to study why elites in industrializing countries implement policies that improve the health of the poor. Exploiting county-level variation in elite structure, we present OLS and IV estimates, suggesting that elites improve health services due to pressure exerted by workers' movements and that they voluntarily implement policies that prevent disease outbreaks. An analysis of two roll-call votes substantiates the findings of the county-level analysis.

3.) E. Brox & T. Krieger (2022). Birthplace diversity and team performance. Labour Economics, 79(1), 102288. [Link]

Using a hand-collected data set that includes detailed information on 7,208 matches and 3,266 players from the highest division of German male soccer, this paper examines how birthplace diversity affects team performance. The results of two different instrumental variable analyses suggest that birthplace diversity has a hump-shaped effect on team performance. To explain this finding, we argue that nationally diverse teams have a wider range of skills and face greater communication barriers. Methodologically, this paper shows that standard fixed effect methods neglect that team compositions change endogenously throughout the production process, and can therefore produce heavily biased regression results on the consequences of diversity for team performance.

4.) T. Krieger (2022). Democracy and the quality of economic institutions: theory and evidence. Public Choice, 192(1), 357 - 376. [Link]

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on economic institutional quality increases in people's human capital. Using a panel data set that covers 150 countries and the period from 1920 to 2019, and different measures of economic institutional quality, we show results from fixed effect and instrumental variable regressions that are in line with the predictions of our model.

5.) K. Gründler & T. Krieger (2022). Should we care (more) about data aggregation?. European Economic Review, 142(1), 104010. [Link] [Link to final working paper]

Aggregation tools transform multidimensional data into indices. To investigate how the design of an aggregation process affects regression results, we build democracy indices that differ regarding their scale and aggregation function. Using the democracy-growth nexus as a testing ground, we illustrate that the choice of the aggregation procedure significantly affects OLS and 2SLS estimates since different methods produce systematically different index values for observations at the lower and upper end of the autocracy-democracy spectrum. We also illustrate that dichotomous measures produce significantly smaller OLS estimates than continuous measures due to lower discriminating power. Whether continuous and dichotomous indicators create different 2SLS estimates depends on their design. Because of the methodological similarities of democracy indicators and other social science indicators, we expect similar consequences for other empirical analyses.

6.) K. Gründler & T. Krieger (2021). Using Machine Learning for measuring democracy: A practitioners guide and a new updated dataset for 186 countries from 1919 to 2019. European Journal of Political Economy, 70(1), 102047. [Link]

We provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on the measurement of democracy and present an extensive update of the Machine Learning indicator of Gründler and Krieger (2016). Four improvements are particularly notable: First, we produce a continuous and a dichotomous version of the Machine Learning democracy indicator. Second, we calculate intervals that reflect the degree of measurement uncertainty. Third, we refine the conceptualization of the Machine Learning Index. Finally, we significantly expand the data coverage by providing democracy indices for 186 countries in the period from 1919 to 2019.

7.) K. Gründler & T. Krieger (2016). Democracy and growth: Evidence from a Machine Learning indicator. European Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 45 (Supplement), 85 - 107. [Link]

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. The Support Vector Machines Democracy Index (SVMDI) is continuous on the [0,1] interval and enables very detailed and sensitive measurement of democracy for 185 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. Application of the SVMDI yields results which highlight a robust positive relationship between democracy and economic growth. We argue that the ambiguity in recent studies mainly originates from the lack of sensitivity of traditional democracy indicators. Analyzing transmission channels through which democracy exerts its influence on growth, we conclude that democratic countries feature better educated populations, higher investment shares, and lower fertility rates, but not necessarily higher levels of redistribution.

Papers under review

1) E. Brox & T. Krieger (2024). Far-right protests and their effect on internal migration.

Work-in-progress

1.) Taxing secondary residents (with Enzo Brox, Jan Kempler, and Lukas Tohoff).

2.) Wealth inequality and persistence in political power. Evidence from Germany's first democratic transition (with Lena Gerling).

3.) Capitalist power and the provision of human-capital promoting public goods in industrializing regimes: Evidence from 19th century Germany (with Lena Gerling).

4.) Institutional rules and their e ect on the distribution of political power: Evidence from German cities (with Lena Gerling).

5.) Canceled reforms and populist voting (with Sebastian Blesse and Felix Roesel).

6.) Religion and access to saving opportunities in Germany: Evidence from the long 19th century (single-authored).

7.) Social identity and public policy (with Toke Aidt and Alex Wakeham)

8.) Socialism and women in politics (with Lena Gerling and Kim Leonie Kellermann).

Tommy Krieger
Senior Research, ZEW – Leibniz-Centre for European Economic Research Mannheim, Department for Corporate Taxation and Public Finance

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