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Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the "China shock" literature, we hypothesize...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013427715
In this paper we investigate the relation between population, wages and urban population in the Italian economy. During the period examined, 1320-1870, the prevailing conditions were those of a poor, mainly agricultural economy with limited human capital and rudimentary technology. However,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010435778
This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012314909
The Reformation provided a powerful source of legitimacy for secularization of governance and enabled the regional authorities to change the institutional structure to eliminate the inefficiencies under the prevailing (Catholic) regime. We investigate this idea in a simple model of regime change...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011522510
Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the “China shock” literature, we...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014077005
This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013315182
We study the stock market performance of firms with Jewish board members during the "Dreyfus Affair" in 19th century France. In a context of widespread latent antisemitism, initial accusations made against the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus led to short-lived abnormal negative returns for...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014469520
We employ proprietary data from a large bank to analyze how – during crisis – deposit insurance affects depositor behavior. Our focus is on Belgium where the government increased explicit deposit insurance coverage and implemented implicit deposit insurance arrangements. Estimating sorting...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014469570
In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010274780
The aim of this paper is to analyze the sustainability of public debt in Italy during the last 150 years (1861-2010) by employing a database containing several statistical novelties: new time series estimates of public debt and GDP (respectively Bank of Italy and Baffigi, 2011) and an original...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010292801