This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid endogeneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with two sets of instruments:...

This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid endo-geneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with an instrument based on the...

This paper introduces and describes a new city-level data set on political institutions in pre-modern Europe. To be precise, it presents three variables reporting the prevalence of the different existing types of participative political institutions between 800 AD and 1800 AD in 104 cities in...

Recently the topic of global warming has become very popular. The literature has concentrated its attention on the evidence of such effect, either by detecting regime shifts or change points in time series. The majority of these methods are designed to find shifts in mean, but only few can do...

We examine the evolution of decentralized clearinghouse mechanisms from the 13th to the 18th century; in particular, we explore the clearing of non- or limitedtradable debts like bills of exchange. We construct a theoretical model of these clearinghouse mechanisms, similar to the models in the...

Gold clauses were one of the most legally troublesome issues in international contracting during the 1920s-1930s. The litigation over gold clauses was a sign that the old monetary order based on the international gold standard was breaking down, despite all the efforts of national governments...

On the temperature derivative market, modeling temperature volatility is an important issue for pricing and hedging. In order to apply pricing tools of financial mathematics, one needs to isolate a Gaussian risk factor. A conventional model for temperature dynamics is a stochastic model with...

The exorbitant privilege literature analyses the positive returns differential on net foreign assets enjoyed by the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century as the issuer of the global reserve currency. In the first age of international financial integration (1871–1914), the...