IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34586.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Cost of State-Building: Evidence from Germany

Author

Listed:
  • Leander Heldring

Abstract

I examine the potential of pro-development state (capacity) building projects to be coopted for repression. I leverage the natural experiment created by the differential build-up of capacity between formerly Prussian and formerly non-Prussian parts of unified Germany, and the radical policy shifts instigated by the Nazi regime. Across a geographical discontinuity, and across different stops of the same train transport to the East, I find that Prussian municipalities were significantly more efficient at deporting Germany's Jews. They were also better at providing public goods and at collecting taxes. Just before the Nazis came to power, Prussian municipalities also provided public goods more efficiently, but were not differentially involved with anti-Semitism. I show that democratic oversight and aspects of bureaucratic culture can mitigate the potential for future abuse of state building projects.

Suggested Citation

  • Leander Heldring, 2025. "The Cost of State-Building: Evidence from Germany," NBER Working Papers 34586, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34586
    Note: DEV POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34586.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • N43 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • N44 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - Europe: 1913-
    • P50 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Comparative Economic Systems - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34586. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.