The “less-developed” interior of early modern Europe, especially the rural economy, is often regarded as financially comatose. This paper investigates this view using a rich dataset of marriage and death inventories for seventeenth-century Germany. It first analyzes how borrowing varied with...

This paper uses evidence from German-speaking central Europe to address open questions about the Consumer and Industrious Revolutions. Did they happen outside the early-developing, North Atlantic economies? Were they shaped by the “social capital” of traditional institutions? How were they...

Demographic behaviour is influenced not just by attributes of individuals but also by characteristics of the communities in which those individuals live. A project on ‘Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition’ is analyzing the longterm determinants of...

Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, it has been argued, enforced contracts collectively through a closed, private-order coalition. We show that this view is untenable. Not a single empirical example adduced as evidence of the putative...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as ‘social networks’ that generated beneficial ‘social capital’ by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by...

Many historians now reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies. It is argued here, however, that no sharp distinction between qualitative and quantitative concepts can be drawn, as almost any concept used to describe a past society is implicitly quantitative....

This study explores and quantifies the benefits of connecting more distributed generation (with and without the use of smart connections) across different parties (Distribution Network Operators, wider society and generators). Different connection scenarios are proposed (with partial and full...

What causes ‘gas wars’ between Russia and Ukraine? In this paper I argue that contract disputes in the eastern European gas sector are specific instances of a broader set of phenomena: bargains over strategically important resource issues outside of any international framework to facilitate...

This paper develops a long-run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the "Dutch disease" and the "resource curse", which primarily focuses on...

I study strategy-proof assignment mechanisms where the agents reveal their preference rankings over the available objects. A stochastic mechanism returns lotteries over deterministic assignments, and mechanisms are compared according to first-order stochastic dominance. I show that non-wasteful...