This paper shows that railroad building in Russia, as in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, improved the value of land, a classic benefit of transportation investment in largely agrarian countries. From a database constructed for this paper, we use cross-sectional data for the fifty...

We exploit a historical experiment that occurred in Czechoslovakia after World War Two to study the drivers of social capital accumulation in an extremely unfavorable environment. Between 1945 and 1948, the Sudetenland became the scene of ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of nearly three...

This special issue focuses on the financial behaviour of different participants in European medieval and early modern financial markets. It extends our knowledge of the financial strategies employed by households, merchants, charities, city governments and corporations by asking what investment...

This introduction sketches out what relevance wood and wood products have had in Europe's industrial societies. It also summarizes some peculiarities of the wood-based businesses caused by both the materiality of wood and the ecologies of forests. Most importantly, the introduction...

One of the Wehrmacht's main goals in the Caucasus were the oil fields. A special unit for the Caucasus operation was the "Technische Brigade Mineralöl" (Mineral Oil Technical Brigade). The large volume of surviving files from the TBM allows us to glean new insights into the German prisoner of...

This paper examines how network ties between local social leaders influenced the diffusion of mass protests in an autocracy. We focus on the Protestant Church and the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany. To quantify the role of leader networks in protest diffusion, we compile biographical...

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Leveraging a newly constructed, century-spanning dataset on...

This paper studies how discriminatory fake news arises and spatially diffuses. We focus on India at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: on March 30, a Muslim convention (the Tablighi Jamaat) in New Delhi became publicly recognized as a COVID hotspot, and the next day, fake news on Muslims...

The @premodern European transport network was accompanied by a number of institutions that affected the transaction costs related to commercial travel, such as fairs, staple markets and toll stations. With digital techniques and big datasets, it is now possible to study these phenomena on a...

The unexpected loss of a large cargo of barley taken on loan in Barcelona in 1021 suggests that the merchandise was intended for export. The Jewish merchant concerned, named Benevenisti, may have lost the cargo as a result of a shipwreck. An Arab source from the 11th century reports a maritime...