At the Competence-Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation (CC-ME) we advise and support EU policy making through ex-post causal evaluation and data-driven microeconomic analysis. The CC-ME hosts a Microeconometric Seminar Series to promote discussions with external researchers from academia and other institutions. Our Seminar Series is intended to disseminate advanced research methodologies and topics in the field of microeconomic evaluation. To further disseminate the benefits of our Series across the JRC, we post a summary of the presented papers together with the presenters' views and opinions on their research and the future of the field of Applied Economics. |
Last week we had the pleasure of having Professor Eichmeyer from Bocconi University present her work: The Value of Learning History. Professor Eichmeyer and her co-author study whether history education about past authoritarian regimes serves to foster support for democratic institutions and inoculate citizens against authoritarian ideologies from the extremes of the political spectrum successfully. To do so, they exploit an education reform in a large German state mandating that the topics covered in the last two years of the high school history curriculum rotate exogenously across graduating cohorts. As a result of this natural experiment, some cohorts only covered the far-left socialist regime of East Germany, whereas others only covered the far-right fascist regime of Nazi Germany. Surveying more than 2,000 former students a decade after graduation, the authors find that learning about East Germany relative to Nazi Germany increases knowledge of East German history and decreases support for extreme left-wing ideology. Attitudes towards extreme right-wing ideology are largely unaffected, consistent with high baseline levels of awareness about the pitfalls of far-right ideology among high school graduates in Germany.
To learn more about Professor Eichmeyer's work and opinions about the future of the field of Applied Economics we asked her to briefly answer a series of questions.
You can find her answer to each of our questions below.
Q: What attracted you to research the topics in your paper? A: I’ve always been interested in understanding how political believes and world views come about, and how they are shaped by the environment. Education, especially the humanities and social sciences, is one area that’s often hypothesized to matter a lot, but we don’t know much about it, because of obvious causal inference problems. So I looked for and found a natural experiment in this domain that led to large variation in school curricula. |
Q: Where is the research area where your paper fits moving? A: It’s still moving towards more use of natural and field experiments. |
Q: What, in your opinion, will the next breakthrough in Applied Economics be? A: I hope we will develop more methods that allow us to gauge entire causal trees, as opposed to estimating small, individual branches independently with little ability for pasting them together. |
The CC-ME team would like to congratulate Professor Eichmeyer for her insightful research and thank her for presenting it in our Seminar Series.
For more information on the upcoming presentations and how to participate in our Seminar Series please visit our dedicated website.
| Originally Published | 21 Jul 2024 |
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