Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of...

New inventions are good for economic growth, but equally important are improvements in the way we make things - what's known as process innovation. Tim Leunig and Joachim Voth measure the impact of two such innovations - mechanical cotton spinning and the motorcar assembly line - on the world's...

In 1500, Europe was composed of hundreds of statelets and principalities, with weak central authority, no monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, and overlapping jurisdictions. By 1800, only a handful of powerful, centralized nation states remained. We build a model that explains both the...

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many...

Efforts at fiscal consolidation are often limited because of concerns over potential social unrest. From German austerity measures during the 1930s to the violent demonstrations in Greece in 2010, hard times have tended to go hand in hand with antigovernment violence. In this paper, I assemble...

London’s financial market underwent dramatic change after 1700. More limited than Paris or Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, London became the leading financial centre in Europe in the eighteenth century. There is an extensive and growing literature on the causes of this change, but...

We analyze the rise of the first socio-economic institution in history that limited fertility – long before the Demographic Transition. The "European Marriage Pattern" (EMP) raised the marriage age of women and ensured that many remained celibate, thereby reducing childbirths by up to one...

Philip II of Spain accumulated debts equivalent to 60% of GDP. He also defaulted four times on his short-term loans, thus becoming the first serial defaulter in history. Contrary to a common view in the literature, we show that lending to the king was profitable even under worst-case scenario...

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently economists have found relatively large gains from electricity, computers and cell...

This paper examines the value of connections between German industry and the Nazi movement in early 1933. Drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns, we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the...