Effects of (dis-)integrations at the Austrian-Czech border

About the project

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Austrian-Czech border region has been exposed to recurrent large-scale and unforeseen episodes of economic integration and disintegration. The current project will use this unique historical experience of repeated (dis-)integration to analyze its economic effects empirically and to test the predictions of economic geography models of regional development. The project will therefore substantially enrich the still rather limited but growing empirical literature on the regional economic consequences of market (dis-)integration at the subnational level.

The project is funded by Austrian Science Fund and Czech Science Foundation (GF20-18033L).

Spin-off papers

The Grass Is Not Greener on the Other Side: The Role of Attention in Voting Behaviour

Lucie Coufalová & Štěpán Mikula
The effect of ranking and the effect of attention both increase the chances that candidates running in the top positions of electoral lists will win voters' support. We exploit a variation in ballot layout (the location of the break between the first and second sides of the ballot) in the 2006--2017 Czech parliamentary elections to disentangle these effects and identify the effect of attention. We show that being listed on the reverse side of the ballot paper decreases electoral support by at least 50%. ECON MUNI Working paper

Expected Transport Accessibility Improvement and House Prices: Evidence from the Construction of the World's Longest Undersea Road Tunnel

Štěpán Mikula & Peter Molnár
This paper studies the impact of expected transport accessibility improvement on house prices. We identify the effect exploiting a quasi-natural experiment created by the approval and construction of the Ryfast tunnel system in Rogaland, Norway, which shortened the travelling time to the affected municipality from 62 to 24 minutes. Estimates of a repeated sales model in a difference-in-differences framework show that the expectation of improvement in transport accessibility connected with the construction of the tunnel system led to an increase in house prices by 10.1-12.8% on average. That effect grew as the opening of the tunnel drew closer and was driven by less valuable houses. ECON MUNI Working paper

Homophily in Voting Behavior: Evidence from Preferential Voting

Lucie Coufalová, Štěpán Mikula & Michal Ševčík
Homophily is a strong determinant of many types of human relationships. It affects, for example, whom we marry and potentially also whom we vote for. We use data on preferential voting from Czech parliamentary elections in 2006, 2010, 2013, and 2017 matched with 2011 Census data to identify the effect of homophily on voting behavior. We find that a one percent increase in the share of the municipality’s population that has the same occupation or education level as the candidate increases the number of preferential votes that candidate receives by 0.7% or 0.5%, respectively. We also find that candidates who live in the voters’ municipality receive a substantially higher number of preferential votes. ECON MUNI Working paper

Team

Peter Egger

Principal Investigator at WIFO

E‑mail:

Peter Huber

E‑mail:
Web:	https://www.wifo.ac.at/en/peter_huber

No description

Ismail Celebi

E‑mail:

Lucie Coufalová

E‑mail:

Štěpán Mikula

Principal Investigator at MUNI

E‑mail:
Web:	https://sites.google.com/site/stepanmikula/