This paper investigates the extent to which attitudes are affected by political regimes and government policies. We focus on female attitudes toward work and gender-role attitudes in the population at large, which have been shown to have significant effects on labor market outcomes. We exploit the imposition of state-socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, and their efforts to promote women's economic inclusion, for both instrumental and ideological reasons, presenting evidence from two different datasets. First, we take advantage of the German partition into East and West after 1945 and unique access to restricted information on place of residence to implement a spatial regression discontinuity design. We find more positive attitudes toward work in the sample of East German women. We also find evidence that increased female access to higher education and fulltime employment, arguably two of the very few positive aspects of living under state-socialism, may have served as channels for regime influence. Second, we employ a difference-indifferences strategy that compares attitudes formed in Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) and Western European Countries (WECs), before and after the imposition of state socialism in CEECs. Gender-role attitudes formed in CEECs during the state socialist period appear to be significantly less traditional than those formed in WECs. [Z10, P51, J16]

Localized knowledge spillovers are a common explanation for the productivity advantages of agglomeration. Nevertheless if information can easily ‡ow out of …rms, the question of why the e¤ects of spillovers are localized must be clari…ed. If knowledge is embedded in workers and di¤uses when workers move between …rms, the strong localized aspect of knowledge spillovers may arise at least in part from the propensity of workers to change jobs within the same local labor market. In this paper I present direct evidence on the role of …rm-to-…rm labor mobility in enhancing the productivity of …rms located near highly productive …rms. Using Social Security earnings records for workers matched to detailed …nancial data for their employers in Veneto, a region of Italy with many successful industry clusters, I …rst identify a set of highly productive …rms. I then show that hiring a worker with experience at highly productive …rms signi…cantly increases the productivity of other (non-highly productive) …rms. I do so using di¤erent techniques, including an instrumental variable strategy which exploits downsizing events at highly productive …rms. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that worker ‡ows can explain around 10% of the productivity gains experienced by other …rms when new highly productive …rms are added to a local labor market.

We study whether cultural attitudes towards gender, the young, and leisure are significant determinants of the employment rates of women and of the young, and of hours worked. We do this controlling for policies, institutions and other structural characteristics of the economy which may influence labor market outcomes. We identify the effect of culture exploiting the evolution over time within country, as well as across countries, of cultural attitudes. We also address the endogeneity of attitudes, policies, and institutions, and allow for the persistent nature of labor market outcomes. We find that culture matters for women's employment rates and for hours worked. However, policies, in particular employment protection legislation and taxes, are also important and their quantitative impact substantial. (JEL: J16, J22, J23, Z1)

Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? In this paper we match data on thousands of notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical data on city institutions and population. Our main variable of interest is the number of famous creatives (scaled to local population) born in a city during a century, but we also look at famous immigrants (based on location of death). We first document several stylized facts: famous births and immigrants are spatially concentrated and clustered across disciplines, creative clusters are persistent but less than population, and spatial mobility has remained stable over the centuries. Next, we show that the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms and promoting local autonomy facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent.