We show that smaller, regional public financial intermediaries significantly contributed to industrial development, using a new data set of the foundation year and location of Prussian savings banks. This extends the banking-growth nexus beyond its traditional focus on the large universal banks,...

Italy has been characterized, throughout its history as a unified country, by large regional differentials in the levels of income, industrialization and socio-economic development. This paper aims at testing the New Economic Geography hypothesis on the role of market access in explaining these...

The recent work by E. Felice, Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro, il Mulino, Bologna, 2013, is rather a pamphlet than a book of economic history. In the present article, we discuss both the statistical series of regional GDP from 1871 until 2001 worked out by Felice (section 1), and the...

This study empirically establishes a link between medieval trade, agglomeration and contemporary regional development in ten European countries. It documents a statistically and economically significant positive relationship between prominent involvement in medieval trade and commercial...

How can agricultural inheritance traditions affect structural change and economic development in rural areas? The most prominent historical traditions are primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits the whole farm, and equal partition, where land is split and each heir inherits an equal share....

We investigate how initial conditions that existed in East Germany at the end of the socialist regime impact regional development during the turbulent shock transition to a market economic system. Our investigation spans a period of almost 30 years. Both the self-employment rate (an indication...

We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers governing large territories, where administrative power needs to be delegated to local elites. We describe how economic change can motivate rulers to empower different elites and emphasize the interaction...

The study of universities' role in regional engagement has traditionally been focusing on exceptional cases. This book presents a reconceptualization which embraces its underlying complexity and proposes a roadmap for a renewed research agenda. Starting from the grassroots level of universities'...