Assist. Prof. Andrea Bernini

Acquisition of Productive Human Capital in East Germany

During his visit to CES, Andrea Bernini will advance an ongoing project on human capital investment under authoritarian institutions. Exploiting topography-driven variation in East Germans’ reception of West German television, it shows how foreign media eroded the perceived legitimacy of the socialist regime and led students to withdraw from state-dependent schooling. After reunification stripped the political premium from these credentials, the labor-market penalty for the forgone schooling closed, suggesting that what students declined to acquire was political rather than productive human capital.

Andrea Bernini is an applied microeconomist and political economist who studies how institutions, policies, and information shape political participation, representation, and economic inequality, with a particular focus on race in the United States. In a series of papers on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he and his coauthors trace how the removal of formal barriers to Black political participation reshaped local office holding, public finances, and racial attitudes, alongside the counter-mobilization it provoked among white voters. He has also studied how corruption functions as a push and pull factor of migration flows, with evidence derived from European countries

Andrea Bernini is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and an Associate Editor of Oxford Economic Papers. He was previously affiliated with the University of Oxford. His research has appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Health Economics, and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, among other outlets. He holds a BSc in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Nottigham as well as an MPhil and a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.