This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able to credibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences their decisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

The paper provides a historical overview of the pre-modern allocation of work within the territory of the later Germany from the 18th until the middle of the 19th century. We explore how the social allocation of work during the feudal system took place and trace back the development of wage...

Why did enduring traditions of economic and political liberty arise in Western Europe? An answer to this question must be sought at the constitutional level. Within the medieval constitutional order, traditions of representative and limited government developed through patterns of constitutional...

In his book, the Political Economy of Growth (1957), and in an article he wrote several years earlier (1953), the economist Paul A. Baran noted how in an economic system characterized by a hierarchy of classes and where economic and political power are concentrated in the top class of such a...

The aim of this paper is to understand why some economies do not adopt existing technologies. It focuses on the political factor and studies this phenomenon through the distinctive and interesting experience of European growth: the remarkable economic expansion that took place in northwestern...

'Where feudalism ends, the capitalist regime commences.' This familiar and prima facie self-evident statement is the proposition which I want to examine in this paper. I would argue as follows: Even given the uniformity of feudalism everywhere in the world (i.e. if it has always appeared in its...

Today’s record levels of economic inequality are infecting our future as the top 0.01% bequest vast wealth to their descendants. With the death of the Rule Against Perpetuities (RAP), this inequality has the potential to harden social class lines not just for a generation or two but forever....