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didn't have much of an effect. In other environments, we find that trying harder raised death rates... but the medal hunt comes with no obvious death penalty.

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small morsel that shows that status concerns were a key driver: not everyone played the game. Pilots who already possessed alternative sources of high status—aristocrats, senior officers, or those with pre-war distinctions—were significantly less responsive to medal incentives...

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pilots. Over time, as the war dragged on, the awards diffused to lower-ranked (though still elite) pilots. This created a need for new 'carrots'. Incentives mattered because the business was inherently risky; more than 80% of pilots in our sample died.

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We argue this follows the logic of fashion cycles (Pesendorfer 1995). Status goods are signals. Their value depends on the exclusivity of the group that possesses them. Our data show a clear "cheapening" effect: the earliest recipients of the Knight’s Cross were the most skilled

engineered a "rat race" that extracted significant additional effort from its best pilots. When pilots got close to the informal quota, their effort spiked; once they had the award, it slumped. New medals spelled more renewed efforts.

the High Command introduced successively more exclusive variants: first adding "Oak Leaves," then "Swords," then "Diamonds," and finally "Golden Oak Leaves." The data demonstrate that the Luftwaffe successfully

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The Luftwaffe ran a sophisticated system of awards. To qualify for higher ones, u had to have the first medal. As the war progressed and the initial medal became too common" among elites,

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https://tinyurl.com/47npwc8d

Of course, they served an evil regime. Can we learn from what motivated them regardless? In "Never Enough: Dynamic Status Incentives in Organizations" we examine data from more than 5,000 fighter pilots. t.co/pA5ll2BOMG

t.co

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Joachim Voth @jvoth.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

How do you motivate workers? Leo Bursztyn, Ewan Racliffe and I have a new paper. We look at highly skilled 'workers' whose effort was near-impossible to monitor -- German fighter pilots in WW2.

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With David Boll and Sascha Becker -- coming soon to a theatre near you -- a new and exciting no-motion-picture "should you distrust cross-sectional spatial data?" [spoiler alert - you can relax, it's not so bad]

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Joachim Voth @jvoth.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

But can go the other way as with higher albedo from vapor trails.

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Joachim Voth @jvoth.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Sure but that is rounding error stuff

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Joachim Voth @jvoth.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Well. If electric its covered. If diesel its not. We can sign the likeky effect.

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Reposted by Joachim Voth

Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

I use this exact example in my very first ECON 101 lecture. I now have AV content.

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Philipp Golka @pgolka.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

reminds me of the immortal essay by Stanley Fish "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos"...

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Reposted by Joachim Voth

Having found in my masters thesis that high testosterone individuals prefer being seen as winners even if it means losing money, I had no idea we're talking *that* much money. If you're a hedge fund manager and want to set up an aggressive tesosterone-based trading strategy, hmu!

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declares that their 800+km train ride did something good for the environment? Is is ignorance, or a latent desire to suffer for the sins of having what you want? Color me confused....

diesel trains are exempt from ETS 1 like all other transport like cars + trucks). Economists! I understand that some people don't get it. Cap+trade is not complicated, but maybe a bit more abstract... but why do I now regularly get to conferences where some slightly wrinkled colleague proudly

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Sascha O. Becker @essobecker.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Conference. Distinguished colleagues; smart, top-of-the-game. Someone drops a "good for the climate" when I say I took the train... I look puzzled. What? There is emissions trading in Europe. Total CO2 is *capped*; net footprint of flights in Europe is ZERO. Same, btw, not true of trains (bec

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Reposted by Joachim Voth

🚨 New Working Paper 🚨 w/ @pdavidboll.bsky.social and @jvoth.bsky.social Do you run regressions on spatial data? Then keep reading! We present a guide and Stata package for methods by Müller and Watson (2024 ECTA) to deal with Spatial Unit Roots in Regressions. Link in 🧵 (1/n)

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Dani Rodrik @drodrik.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Do u seriously think that a social awkward, Auschwitz visiting, hostage-supporting, borderline Asperger's billionaire is doing a Nazi salute?

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Reposted by Joachim Voth

Great work by Lagakos, Michalopoulos, and Voth on personal narratives from 1930s to ask what gives people meaning. Work and community top the list. Neither enters economists' understanding of well-being directly. A big blind spot in how we evaluate policy impacts. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2ej7c...

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Josh Rhodes @joshrhodes.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

So pleased my article on geo-coding addresses of 121 million + people in British censuses 1851-1911 is now out with Historical Methods! #openaccess - map any census info (ages, occupations, birthplaces etc) by address - link census to other spatial datasets Get the code and data 👇

Map of London in 1901 showing percentage of people born overseas by street.

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The paper (ungated) is here: github.com/huggingbeard...

github.com

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The Harvard longitudinal study, tracking undergrads and Boston city residents since the 1940s, concluded that only close personal relationships matter for life satisfaction; this is not what we find.

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councillor who says "The biggest thing in my life?Making it possible [to build] the great St. John River bridge for the people of Duval County.” Family and close relationships are obviously important, but we not find that it dominates all other aspects, as some have argued.

nature. Others found meaning in religion. Three themes loom large: Work, community, and family. The sense of satisfaction in doing a job well, in the cameraderie and pride it brings, is palpable in many narratives; so is the joy of doing things for others, such as the Florida

by the Library of Congress. We train and use a large language model (GPT-4) to analyse these narratives at scale, using extensive human audits to avoid hallucinations. What do we find? Stories vary; some people met Billy the Kid when young, and could never get enough of exploring

directly; instead, we examine interviews conducted by the Federal Writers Project. This was part of the New Deal work creation programs, and the aim was to get many ordinary Americans to tell their life stories in their own words. The interviews are loving preserved

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