Demographic behaviour is influenced not just by attributes of individuals but also by characteristics of the communities in which those individuals live. A project on ‘Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition’ is analyzing the longterm determinants of...

Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, it has been argued, enforced contracts collectively through a closed, private-order coalition. We show that this view is untenable. Not a single empirical example adduced as evidence of the putative...

Many historians now reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies. It is argued here, however, that no sharp distinction between qualitative and quantitative concepts can be drawn, as almost any concept used to describe a past society is implicitly quantitative....

This paper examines recent attempts to rehabilitate pre-modern craft guilds as efficient economic institutions. Contrary to rehabilitation views, craft guilds adversely affected quality, skills, and innovation. Guild rent-seeking imposed deadweight losses on the economy and generated no...

This paper uses evidence from German-speaking central Europe to address open questions about the Consumer and Industrious Revolutions. Did they happen outside the early-developing, North Atlantic economies? Were they shaped by the “social capital” of traditional institutions? How were they...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as ‘social networks’ that generated beneficial ‘social capital’ by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by...

In this paper we examine the spatial and temporal distribution of per capita income across Europe. We base our analysis on a cluster methodology which allows for an endogenous selection of regional clusters using a multivariate test for stationarity where the number and composition of clusters...

In a representative democracy, voters can use elections to protect their property by holding politicians accountable for the tax policies they implement while in office. This paper demonstrates that performance voting can - partly or wholly - solve the capital levy problem. We characterise the...

This paper examines and compares the finite sample performance of the existing tests for sample selection bias, especially under the multi-collinearity problem pointed out by Nawata (1993). The results show that under such multicollinearity problem, (i) the t-test for sample selection bias based...

This paper provides a synthesis and further development of a global modelling approach introduced in Pesaran, Schuermann and Weiner (2004), where country specific models in the form of VARX* structures are estimated relating a vector of domestic variables to their foreign counterparts and then...