Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for...

Did the outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influence technical change during the Industrial Revolution? We address this question by investigating an instance of state intervention into the market for inventions from 1793-1820: the introduction of a new proviso into British...

France sent five thousand men to fight alongside George Washington's army in the American Revolutionary War. We show that the French combatants' exposure to the United States of America increased support for the French Revolution a decade later. French regions (départements) from which more...

Guinnane and Hoffman (subsequently GH) comment on two of our papers: Voigtländer and Voth: “Persecution Perpetuated” (2012, subsequently PP) and Satyanath, Voigtländer and Voth: Bowling for Fascism (2017, subsequently BF). They allege that our econometric results are fragile and depend on...

This chapters surveys the main ideas and tensions in the classical liberal treatment of defense, international relations, and war-making. This sets the stage for a discussion of the feasibility of interstate federalism by identifying key issues and challenges that such a system will need to...

France sent five thousand men to fight alongside George Washington's army in the American Revolutionary War. We show that the French combatants' exposure to the United States of America increased support for the French Revolution a decade later. French regions (départements) from which more...

Migration has always been an omnipresent topic in Germany. However, unlike today, in the 19th century the German territory was a country of emigration, not immigration. Using county-level data for the period from 1861 to 1871, this paper examines the determinants of emigration from and...

There has been supreme importance to the religious institution in the lives of the populations as it represents one of the most vital factors affecting the course of their lives and the way their civilization progresses. Religious beliefs delineated the wide-ranging structure of human behavior...

Exploiting quasi-exogenous variations in the timing of telegraph construction, the reduction of information costs promotes capital market integration in late imperial China. Employing a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the telegraph connection within a prefecture pair reduced the...

We use the discovery of gold in Brazil as a historical quasi-experiment and show that gold roads are positively associated with population density and nightlight incidence in contemporary times. We then use official documents from the 19th century to build a nationwide transportation network...

This article examines the potential impact of turnpike roads on the English/British state’s increasing capacity during the eighteenth century. The literature implicitly suggests that transportation infrastructures impacted state capacities in Europe only after the arrival of railways during...

The explicit concepts of a central bank and monetary policy were not fully articulated until the 20th century, although, with some degree of circumspection, they can be used retrospectively in regard to earlier times. The oldest central banks were hardly central banks in the modern sense at...

Hindenburg a research agency that is known to be famous for gaslighting the inner workings within a corporate with the help many takes a shot position with the help of the investors who were deemed to get the research information before it gets published and as soon as the news broke out as...

The evolution of history as an academic discipline began in the 19th century. The role of the German historians in making the discipline cannot be underestimated as Leopold von Ranke is deemed the ‘father of history’. The impeccable role of the father of Sociology, Auguste Comte can also not...

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's...

All entrepreneurs seek favorable legal or regulatory treatment for their businesses. Sometimes this leads an entrepreneur to build a business within a gap in the law—a loophole. In so doing, these “loophole entrepreneurs” may avoid steep regulatory compliance costs that otherwise would...

We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border...

Seit der Anwerbung sogenannter Gastarbeiter/innen in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren wurde Deutschland nach den USA zum weltweit wichtigsten Zielland für Migranten/-innen. Trotzdem tut sich Deutschland bis heute schwer damit, seine Rolle als Einwanderungsland zu akzeptieren und eine...