This paper investigates the effect of commodity prices, in particular rice and coffee, on the individual decision of migrating in Viet Nam. As most coffee production is sold by households for exports, we would expect that coffee price shocks would have a direct effect on the probability of...

This paper provides an overview of the characteristics of migrant households and analyses the effects of migration in Vietnam, on the basis of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey conducted in 2012 and 2014. The data reveal significant movements of household members, both intra- and...

A quarter-century after reunification, labor productivity in eastern Germany continues to lag systematically behind the West. Denison-Hall-Jones point-in-time estimates point to large gaps in total factor productivity as the proximate cause, and auxiliary measurements which do not rely on...

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...

The public mechanical clock and the movable type printing press were two of the most important and complex general purpose technologies of the late medieval period. We document two of their most important, yet unforeseeable, consequences. First, an instrumental variables analysis indicates that...

We study the potential benefits and mechanisms of firms' political connections by analyzing the Italian experience, where, in the early nineties, Silvio Berlusconi, a rich TV tycoon, became the leader of the conservative political coalition. Using firm-level data, we find that the 101 companies...