Recent crises have cast doubt on the legitimacy of technocratic power, yet its role in global economic governance remains poorly understood. Revisiting the collapse of Bretton Woods, we propose a dynamic theory of global monetary governance to explain how expanding central bank discretion can...

Europe must rapidly increase its military spending, but how? We collect 150 years of data to study what governments in similar situations have done. How were past military buildups financed? What was the relative importance of debt financing, budget cuts, and taxes? Our main finding is that...

Explaining President Trump's "Liberation-day" tariffs on April 2nd, 2025, Stephen Miran, President Trump's chairman of the council of economic advisors suggested that countries accept the U.S. tariffs without retaliation to come to a fair "burden sharing"(Miran: 2025). History shows that this...

We introduce a new dataset on British exports at the bilateral, commodity-level from 1700 to 1899. We then pit two primary determinants of bilateral trade against one another: the trade-diminishing effects of distance versus the trade-enhancing effects of the British Empire. We find that the...

This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land...

In December 1984, an agreement between the European Commission and the European University Institute laid the foundation for what would become the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). The HAEU has since become the EU institutions' official archival centre for the preservation and...

In December 1984, an agreement between the European Commission and the European University Institute laid the foundation for what would become the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). The HAEU has since become the EU institutions' official archival centre for the preservation and...

This brochure informs scholars and citizens about the HAEU (Historical Archives of the European Union), its functions, its precious holdings and research opportunities, and invites people to get involved through learning, discussion and debate on recent European history. Thousands of visitors,...

This brochure informs scholars and citizens about the HAEU (Historical Archives of the European Union), its functions, its precious holdings and research opportunities, and invites people to get involved through learning, discussion and debate on recent European history. Thousands of visitors,...

Duisburg was the first German city to establish official relations with a Chinese city, Wuhan. Less out of strategic calculation or recognition of the global significance of China's reform and opening-up policy, but rather thanks to their common industrial roots in the steel industry, the two...

World War 1 exacerbated the cost of the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 in two ways. First, it facilitated the spread the flu virus through the movement of clusters of infected soldiers and sailors. Second, it constrained public health measures that would have reduced mortality (as during the...

This paper introduces the concept of "climate matching" as a driver of migration and establishes several new results. First, we show that climate strongly predicts the spatial distribution of immigrants in the US, both historically (1880) and more recently (2015), whereby movers select...

Traditional perspectives on decolonization, particularly how European states like France and Britain viewed and analyzed through during the history is vulnerable to find out the Ottomans' sample's elements of decolonization from the past. This paper encourages moving beyond Eurocentric...

Geld ist mehr als ein bedruckter Papierschein oder ein Eintrag auf einem Bankkonto: Es ist eine komplexe soziale Infrastruktur, die das Zusammenleben in modernen Gesellschaften in vielerlei Hinsicht ermöglicht und prägt. Woraus besteht diese Infrastruktur, und was an ihr ist politisch? Die im...

This paper examines the potential impact of institutional shocks on long-term development of property rights and on institutions regulating contracting. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the external institutional shocks might have an uncontemplated side-effect on the institutional development...

Can colonialism affect today's urban outcomes? This paper examines the long-run impact of Concessions - foreign-run enclaves established in the late nineteenth century inside Chinese cities by European settlers for residence and investment purposes. They soon became the new economic hubs of...