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...

Our purpose here is to challenge the "big-bang" approach to economic history in which some alleged institutional imposition - a deus machine - is claimed to launch a series of new economic behaviors. This so-called prime mover is then carried forward by the inexorable forces of path dependency...

Previous studies on the value of terroir, or more generally geographical indications (GI), used hedonic techniques. We use historical data and exploit temporal and geographical variations in the introduction of wine GIs in early twentieth century France to study the impact on the price of...

Despite the advances in New Institutional Economics about the economic consequences of institutions and legal rules, up to now we have only limited knowledge about the mechanisms of the evolution of law. By combining the main ideas of Evolutionary Economics and New Institutional Economics this...

The multiple crises observed in the European Union over the past decade have undermined trust and the foundations for cohesion in Europe. In the absence of a common government, confederations without strong common independent institutions are fragile and prone to collapse. Some of the observed...

In this paper, we explore the long-run effects of cultural and imperial legacies in the Baltic region. Drawing evidence from the 1897 population census in the Russian Empire, we find that localities with a higher share of German historical population are inclined to be more developed in...

Do legal institutions affect norms of cooperation? Using the introduction of the Code Napoleon during the Napoleonic Wars in Germany as a historical experiment, I show that a positive shock to the quality of legal institutions can increase social-capital long-lastingly. I find that individuals...

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman policy-makers adopted a more liberal attitude towards price formation. This was accompanied by the fiscal and administrative centralization of the grain trade. These seemingly contradictory policy changes could, in part, be explained...

What was the impact of urban political structure on economic inequality in preindustrial times? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher economic inequality in a panel of early modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that...