Die SPD war von 1930 bis 1932 nicht an der Regierung beteiligt, tolerierte aber die Spar- und Deflationspolitik des Kabinetts Brüning. Diese Tolerierung suggeriert, dass die SPD die Regierung Brüning gegen ihre wirtschaftspolitischen Überzeugungen unterstützt hätte, um Demokratie und...

Bartels, Jäger and Obergruber (2024) examine how division rules for the inheritance of agricultural land affected distributional outcomes in 19th century and contemporary Germany. The authors use a regression discontinuity design to show that equal-division counties-those in which inheritance...

The persistence literature connects recent outcomes to events long ago. Although this literature is promising, it raises serious questions about how to distinguish deep causal factors that persist across time from alternative explanations derived from the rapidly changing historical context or...

We examine fiscal policies and parliamentary activities of minority governments in the German states. Our sample includes the 16 German states over the period 1981-2024. The results show that minority governments implemented similar fiscal policies to majority governments. Minority governments...

This volume contains the papers presented at the conference "Reich, Recht und Schulden," which took place on September 12, 2025, at the House of Finance of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. The papers address various aspects of the financial history of the Holy Roman Empire between 1648 and...

While the recent rise of populism has led many scholars to study populism in the modern era, its long-run evolution remains underexplored. This paper analyzes German parliamentary speeches to study populism over the long run, covering the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) and the united Federal...

As seldom before, the current war in Ukraine has seen the use of World War II analogies by belligerents and also some Western non-belligerents. They thereby follow in the footsteps of such political leaders as Anthony Eden, Margaret Thatcher, Joseph Stalin, or John F. Kennedy. Indeed, statesmen...