Can infrastructure investment win "hearts and minds"? We analyze a famous case in the early stages of dictatorship - the building of the motorway network in Nazi Germany. The Autobahn was one of the most important projects of the Hitler government. It was intended to reduce unemployment, and was...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to a growing literature on its "dark side". We examine the role of social capital in the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We analyze Nazi Party entry in a cross-section of cities,...

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went...

Using census-based data on the ability to recall one's age, we show that low levels of nutrition impaired numeracy in industrializing England, 1780 to 1850: cognitive ability declined among those born during the Napoleonic wars. The effect was stronger in areas where grain was expensive and...

Kommt der große Crash an den Finanzmärkten, wenn einige große Hedge-Fonds pleite gehen? Und werden demnächst deutsche Unternehmen in großer Zahl von Privatinvestoren übernommen, die Mitarbeiter scharenweise entlassen, die Produktion ins Ausland verlagert, damit enorm hohe...

Will the finance markets experience a crash when some of the big hedge funds go bust? And will we soon be seeing large numbers of German businesses taken over by private investors who then dismiss droves of employees and relocate production abroad so that expectations of enormously high yields...