Job Market Paper

Collective vs. Family Remembrance: Evidence From Two Russian "Betrayal" Policies [current draft]

Abstract: Is family or collective remembrance of the distant past more powerful in shaping current behavior? To answer this question, I link two historical episodes from Armenian history separated by a century.  During both World War I (WWI) and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Russia was anticipated to provide military support to Armenia, its ally, but failed to do so. I demonstrate that the memories of the first Russian "betrayal'' policy were activated after the second war. I use activation, which enhances the salience of memories, to disentangle the effects of family and collective remembrance. I identify family memory of the first "betrayal'' policy using distinct West Armenian (Ottoman Armenian) surnames and proxy collective memory through locations renamed to commemorate lost Armenian localities during WWI.  The difference-in-differences (DiD) approach shows that both family and collective remembrance negatively affect pro-Russian parties' vote share, with all the conventional assumptions of DiD verified.  Family remembrance influences behavior through traumatic recall, whereas collective remembrance operates via social capital.


Awards: PEDD Young Scholar Award 2024, Münster (Germany)
Info: Also available as CERGE-EI Working Paper No. 787  [read]

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Working Papers

Geographic Determinants of Mortality and its Consequences (with David Gomtsyan, CERDI & Èric Roca Fernández, CERDI) [current draft]
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Abstract: This paper investigates how variations in general mortality at birth, shaped by geographic factors, influence human capital investments by altering the expected timeframe for returns. Focusing on 18th century Armenia, we exploit significant altitude differences to study the relationship between geography, life expectancy, and human capital investments. Our findings confirm that higher altitudes, which correlate with lower population density and reduced disease prevalence, lead to lower mortality rates, encouraging greater investments in children’s education and initiating a fertility transition. This study provides empirical support for the link between life expectancy and human capital investments as proposed in unified growth models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the observed demographic patterns in Armenia are driven by mortality gradients rather than increased female autonomy.

Gender After War: Casualties, Nation Building and Extremism After the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire (with Monika Köppl-Turyna, EcoAustria & WU Vienna and Christian Ochsner, CERGE-EI) [current draft]

Abstract: How does war affect the social fabric of societies? And is there any gender divide in nation-building and the shift toward extremism? To answer these questions, we use the unique voting system in Austria's First Republic (1918 to 1934), which counted vote shares and turnout by gender separately. We first discuss absolute differences in voting by gender before we link war exposure to the gender vote gap. We measure war exposure with the geo-coded location of origin of the universe of soldiers who were wounded, killed, prisoners of war, or missing during WWI. War exposure at the local level, i.e., between neighboring municipalities, is uncorrelated to pre-war characteristics. We find that higher war exposure increases female turnout much more than male turnout, but only in national elections and not in local elections. At the same time, higher female turnout in national elections translates to higher vote shares for pan-German parties that aimed to undermine the Austrian state. These differences are pronounced during the first years after WWI and slightly fade out during the late 1920s. We interpret these findings as a general mistrust of women compared to men in the new state with higher war exposure. Our results provide unique insights into gender differences during the process of nation-building and on the erosion of democracy toward extremism in particular.

Work in Progress

The Evolution of the Gender Aspiration Gap (with Lusine Davtyan-Ivanov, CERGE-EI,  Christian Ochsner, CERGE-EI, and  Gregor Pfeifer, University of Sydney)