Luis Bosshart

Academy Scholar
Harvard University, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies
lbosshart@fas.harvard.edu

I work on political economy and study how institutions shape political and economic development over time. I’m currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. I received my PhD from the London School of Economics in 2025. [CV]

Crisis and Absolutism: A Design-based Analysis of the Thirty Years‘ War, with M. Weigand
Accepted, Quarterly Journal of Economics
Abstract
We examine how the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the largest conflict in pre-modern Europe, contributed to the rise of absolutism. We use planned troop movements from secret military communications to estimate the effect of town-level troop presence on the expansion of ruler-controlled fiscal and military capacity and the dismantling of parliaments. During the war, troop presence increased the value of delegating resource mobilization to rulers. After the war, rulers used this capacity, in collaboration with landed elites, to weaken parliaments. Courts and city leagues limited parliamentary decline by alleviating contracting frictions in resource mobilization. With parliaments eliminated, militarized absolutist regimes persisted for centuries. Our findings highlight a dynamic trade-off in the concentration of executive power during states of emergency.

Political Competition and Economic Divergence: Development Before and After the Black Death, with J. Dittmar
Revise and Resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics
Abstract [Video]
We study how political competition shaped a major divergence in development after the labor supply shock of the Black Death. We leverage the interaction between the timing of the exogenous labor supply shock and a boundary between the politically concentrated, low competition East and the politically fragmented, high competition West of Europe. We investigate disaggregated panel data 1200-1800 and find that after the shock, urban construction and the development of city institutions fell by one-third and remained depressed where political competition was low ex ante. This holds (1) comparing neighboring and otherwise similar cities on either side of the boundary, (2) comparing cities subject to the same ruler within states spanning the boundary, and (3) using dynastic shocks as an IV for local political concentration. We find this urban divergence shifted outside options in labor markets and predicts the subsequent institutionalization of serfdom and the spread of farms using labor coercion.

Coordination and Selection in the Rise of Fascism: The ‘Ordinary Men’ of the Nazi Party, with M. Deter, L. Heldring, C. Mohr, M. Weigand
Abstract
We digitize and analyze the near-universe of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) membership records and link them to population and industrial censuses. We use these data to document the geography of party membership, the selection of members, and the dynamics of entry. We find that ninety percent of the variation in membership arises between neighboring villages within counties, with one-quarter recording no members. Early party members were socially selected, but these differences disappeared as the party grew. SS members remained distinct: younger, more educated, and more likely to exhibit Nazi insignia in membership portraits. Entry occurred in discrete waves, with later members disproportionately following earlier members from the same communities, workplaces, and families. These patterns suggest that social interaction and coordination transformed a selective political organization into a mass movement. Consistent with this interpretation, while selection of members diminished over time, local membership levels diverged after the arrival of an early joiner across otherwise similar matched municipalities. Finally, this variation in party membership is associated with subsequent deportations of Germany’s Jews.

Competitive Radicalization among Agents: Evidence from the Holocaust, with M. Weigand
Abstract
We study the dynamics of radicalization under dictatorship. We reconstruct the inner workings of the Nazi regime by linking population records from the party, state, economy, and security apparatus, as well as records of victims of persecution, to secret internal governance records. These records show a system of overlapping jurisdictions in which the ruler rarely intervened and rival organizations acted in his name and competed for his approval. We develop a model in which a ruler cannot specify a policy in advance and can reward agents only with a future post. Rivalry between two agents for the post elicits action before the ruler learns whether it is appropriate, and so also action he would reject. We test the model using variation from troop movements that brought a rival command into a locality held by one command. We link the movements of military and paramilitary units to the timing and location of five million acts of persecution during the Holocaust. We then use high-frequency private information from the diaries of five agents with central roles in the extermination of European Jews, together with central directives, to test the model. We find that decentralized initiative and killing preceded central instructions, as agents competed and took cues from above. These findings suggest that radicalization can arise endogenously from organizational structure.

Coordination and Collusion in Industrial Development
Abstract
Can organizations that sustain collusion also promote growth? In a model, market power imposes static costs but may finance investment when financial frictions bind. We study this trade-off during German industrialization, when the country became a world leader in chemicals and manufacturing, while legally enforceable cartels came to organize more than half of industrial output. We link the universe of cartel contracts and court rulings on their enforceability to annual data on all joint-stock firms, input–output linkages, and industrial censuses through 1933. Using staggered entry into cartels and unexpected changes in legal enforceability, we find that cartel members earned more, invested more, upgraded, and expanded output, especially in capital-intensive industries. Cartelized inputs initially raised costs for downstream buyers. Subsequently, a system of cross-sector contracts facilitated by banks and the state mitigated these costs. In the aggregate, cartelization was associated with higher district industrial employment, yet also with fewer entrants, greater concentration, and a relative decline in regional income in the long run. These findings suggest that enforceable collusion promoted industrial catch-up where finance limited investment, but that it left a system of contractual coordination that constrained later adjustment.

Political Economy after Dictatorship: Denazification in Postwar Germany
Abstract
Can states and societies shift social norms? In a major denazification program, millions of Germans were questioned about their political past by courts. This paper documents how denazification shaped the emerging political landscape in postwar Germany. I leverage sharp variation in denazification across Allied occupation zones, across districts, and within districts. I find that broader denazification reduced the demand for nationalist policies and changed social norms. Differences are driven by mass rather than elite cases and political consequences are observed absent major punishment. The results indicate that the breadth of transitional justice can be more important than its severity in coordinating norms.

Work in Progress

The Political Economy of Labor Coercion in Dictatorship, with M. Weigand

Forced Displacement and Support for the Far Right, with E. Dinas, F. Foos, and V. Fouka

Trade Shock and Political Development, with J. Dittmar 

Mass Media of Remembering: The Role of TV in Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past