Despite his prominence in the socio-political debate on the German housing market before the First World War, Rudolph Eberstadt's (1856-1922) concept of speculation is largely ignored today by German scholars of economics and economic history. Accordingly, speculative operations on markets are...

This paper studies the influence of the service sector (joint-stock commercial banks and railways) on the economic development of agricultural regions within the Russian empire in the second half of the 19th century, using the case of the Central Black Earth region. The study compares yield data...

This paper provides an overview of the various financial resources that existed in medieval Tirol to meet financial needs, using notary registers and court records from the 14 th century as sources. These provide ample evidence of an active capital and land market in rural areas, which offered...

The connection between public spending and the ambitions of urban elites is a common topic in the historiography of the late Middle Ages. However, it is still unclear how city finances and private capital interacted before the use of sophisticated financial systems of the late 13 th to early 14...

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...

Not all major Italian cities of the late Middle Ages could rely on an established and organised system of public debt like Florence, Venice, Genoa, and others. The study of one such city, Bologna, reveals that whenever the city found itself in serious financial straits, outside of ad hoc...

Managing the poor's funds in the Middle Ages was a great responsibility and a rather complex task that relied on the involvement and contributions of numerous persons, not least on the voluntary work of well-educated men. Using the example of the poor relief administration in the small German...

This article consists of a systematic analysis of a large sample of the first purchasers of annuities issued by the urban governments of Catalonia between the years 1313 and 1367. Based on preliminary literature on the subject, it gathers, describes, and contextualizes, both from the point of...

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 propose that the "historically relevant" comparison of the Danish and Russian Empires from the early eighteenth century until the First World War presents a useful starting point for a promising research agenda. We justify the comparison by noting that the two empires enjoyed striking...