Contingent sovereign debt has the potential to create important welfare gains – but actual issuance is rare. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale issuance of contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of...

How persistent are cultural traits? Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we find local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population during 1348–50. We use plague-era pogroms as an indicator for medieval...

We collect new data on the density of associations in 229 towns and cities in interwar Germany. Towns with one standard deviation higher association density – a common proxy for social capital – saw at least 15% faster Nazi Party entry. Not only associations with a militaristic outlook (such...

Powerful, centralized states controlling a large share of national income only begin to appear in Europe after 1500. We build a model that explains their emergence in response to the increasing importance of money for military success. When fiscal resources are not crucial for winning wars, the...

This paper presents new estimates of total factor productivity growth in Britain for the period 1770-1860. We use a dual technique recently popularized by Hsieh (1999), and argue that the estimates we derive from factor prices are of similar quality to quantity-based calculations. Our results...