Italy was unified in 1861. As part of the process of nation-building, a free and mandatory national primary school system was established. While the new school system greatly contributed to the modernization of the country, its initial design did not reduce considerably regional disparities in...

This paper combines a new historical data set regarding capital formation in infrastructure in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century with data-oriented econometric techniques aimed at testing the causal relationship between these infrastructural investments and economic growth. The resulting...

This paper introduces a time series of the Dutch capital stock for 1900-1995. The estimates were derived using the perpetual inventory method. To enhance international comparability, we followed Maddison's standardized methodology. To ensure transparency a thorough description of sources and...

The paper considers a (static) portfolio system that satisfies adding-up contraints and the gross substitution theorem. The paper shows the relationship of the two conditions to the weak dominant diagonal property of the matrix of interest rate elasticities. This enables to investigate the...