Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus provide characterizations of early Germanic (barbarian) society around, respectively, 50 BC and 50 AD. The earlier date corresponds to expansion of Rome to the Rhine and Danube. During the subsequent century Germanic governance institutions changed in a number...

Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

We consider a neoclassical growth model where labor collectively chooses the labor share to maximize its steady-state wage rate. If the labor share increases relative to the competitive share, labor captures a larger share of a smaller total income. At a higher labor share the incentives to...

Robert Solow (1958) argued that, from 1929-1954, U.S. aggregate labor's share was not stable relative to what we would expect given individual industry labor's shares. I confirm and extend this result using data from 1958-1996 that includes 35 industries (roughly 2-digit SIC level) and spans the...

Medieval monarchs in Western Europe responded to financial and military pressures by instituting representative assemblies. Three estates (classes; orders) were represented in these assemblies: clergy, nobility, and burghers. In the late medieval and early modern periods, some states tended...

We explore the relationship between union density and labor shares using panel data on 35 industries, spanning the entire US economy, for the years 1983 through 2005. For the full sample, a standard deviation increase in union membership rates is associated with an increase in an industry’s...