Bartels, Jäger and Obergruber (2024) examine how division rules for the inheritance of agricultural land affected distributional outcomes in 19th century and contemporary Germany. The authors use a regression discontinuity design to show that equal-division counties-those in which inheritance...

We examine fiscal policies and parliamentary activities of minority governments in the German states. Our sample includes the 16 German states over the period 1981-2024. The results show that minority governments implemented similar fiscal policies to majority governments. Minority governments...

This volume contains the papers presented at the conference "Reich, Recht und Schulden," which took place on September 12, 2025, at the House of Finance of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. The papers address various aspects of the financial history of the Holy Roman Empire between 1648 and...

As seldom before, the current war in Ukraine has seen the use of World War II analogies by belligerents and also some Western non-belligerents. They thereby follow in the footsteps of such political leaders as Anthony Eden, Margaret Thatcher, Joseph Stalin, or John F. Kennedy. Indeed, statesmen...

The Weimar Triangle countries - France, Germany, and Poland - could enhance Europe's defense and strategic autonomy thanks to their complementarities. Germany, enjoying fiscal space, opted for debt-financed rearmament but stagnant voluntary recruitment and sluggish procurement form bottlenecks....

Economic and social scientists are increasingly interested in historical data, but many relevant sources are still available in analog form, limiting accessibility and research potential. This article introduces the WBdigital database, which aims to improve this situation. The database provides...

The notion of a nation-specific inflation trauma among the German population is ubiquitous in the public debate in Germany and beyond. According to a widespread reading of history because of its experience with hyperinflation in 1923, the Germans not only fear rising prices but favor a...

In recent years, German colonialism has received growing public attention - a history long overshadowed by the World Wars. Due to its short-lived character, a long-term comparative view of German colonialism has not featured prominently in most accounts of European imperialism. This chapter...

We study the long-term effects of inflation surges on inflation expectations using Germany as a laboratory. Households living in areas with higher local inflation during the hyperinflation of the 1920s expect higher inflation today, even after controlling for known determinants of historical...

While the recent rise of populism has led many scholars to study populism in the modern era, its long-run evolution remains underexplored. This paper analyzes German parliamentary speeches to study populism over the long run, covering the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) and the united Federal...

The persistence literature connects recent outcomes to events long ago. Although this literature is promising, it raises serious questions about how to distinguish deep causal factors that persist across time from alternative explanations derived from the rapidly changing historical context or...

This short article introduces the German Cliometrics Database as the foundation for an article by Jopp and Spoerer (2024) who trace cliometric research on German history. This newly constructed database of every publication that (1) contributes to the historiography of Germany and (2) employs,...

War is back in Europe and as it becomes long-lasting, the question of armament gains central importance. This report finds that Russian military industrial capacities have been rising strongly in the last two years, well beyond the levels of Russian material losses in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the...

What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We investigate consequences of land inequality, exploiting variation in land inheritance rules that traverse political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land...

Using interwar German agriculture as a case, this paper explores the political cost of debt deflation which we characterize with farmers' leverage ratios. Primary deficits drove their increase during 1924-1928, but deflation pushed them to unsustainable levels during 1929-1932. We construct...

100 Jahre Erich Schmidt Verlag, ein Jahrhundert bewegte Unternehmensgeschichte: Einzigartige Einblicke in die Entwicklungslinien von Fachinformationsverlagen und die Erfolgsgeschichte eines Berliner Familienunternehmens erwarten Sie in dieser besonderen Edition, die mehr als eine reine...

Purpose - This paper aims at a qualitative investigation and analysis of the complicated situation of the four German Political Foundations (GPFs) - Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Hanns Seidel Foundation - as actors of democracy...

How do health crises affect election results? We combine a panel of election results from 1893 1933 with spatial heterogeneity in excess mortality due to the 1918 Influenza to assess the pandemic's effect on voting behavior across German constituencies. Applying a dynamic...

How do health crises affect election results? We combine a panel of election results from 1893–1933 with spatial heterogeneity in excess mortality due to the 1918 Influenza to assess the pandemic’s effect on voting behavior across German constituencies. Applying a dynamic...

We study the long-term effects of inflation surges on inflation expectations. German households living in areas with higher local inflation during the hyperinflation of the 1920s expect higher inflation today. Our evidence points towards a transmission of inflation experiences from parents to...

How do health crises affect election results? We combine a panel of election results from 1893-1933 with spatial heterogeneity in excess mortality due to the 1918 Influenza to assess the pandemic's effect on voting behavior across German constituencies. Applying a dynamic...

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...

The article treats the history of Germany’s Great Inflation from 1914 to 1923. It focusses on explaining the turning points of wholesale price trends. It demonstrates that these were mostly triggered by national and international political decisions immediately impacting the mark exchange...

Germany’s hyperinflation resulted from a confluence of several factors, all of which contributed to a temporary breakdown in state capacity and to unsustainable public sector deficits. Wartime debt deflated by 90% already in 1920. Informal wage indexation and failure to enforce collection of a...