This article briefly reviews the core literature on the Golden Age of economic growth and tests the explanatory power of alternative theories against one another, with particular emphasis on the reconstruction thesis as developed by Jánossy. While previous empirical work on the subject relied...

This paper reveals the impact of wartime destruction in urban housing on regional economic growth in West Germany between 1939 and 1950. I demonstrate econometrically that the German economy remained severely dislocated as long as the urban housing stock had not been rebuilt. The recovery of...

This paper draws on a natural experiment to examine the effects of policy arrangements on international trade. We study data on trade and currency bloc formation in Europe after the Great Depression. Far removed from being customs or currency unions, these blocs could not create much trade and...

Historical national account data are often plagued by quality problems, and rivaling series imply different business cycle chronologies. This problem is particularly grave for Germany before World War I [Burhop, C., Wolff, G.B., 2005. A compromise estimate of net national product and the...