In the process of globalization, international convergence of competition legislation has steadily gained importance. Yet, specific aspects of European history gave capital markets, corporate governance and competition policies a special flavor. Historically grown peculiarities have to be taken...

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 remains one of the biggest urban disasters in American history. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of how the city coped with the immediate consequences of the catastrophe and quickly rebuilt. It analyzes the tense political situation of San Francisco...

This research project of the Research Institute for Social and Economic History at the University of Cologne is to clarify the process and causes of the theft of precious metals by the Nazis as well as explaining the economic utilization of the stolen property between 1938 and 1945, giving...

The law on Foreign Exchange Control, which had been passed as early as 1931 in oder to fight the scarcity of foreign currency, was used to impede the transfer of Jewish property abroad immediately after the Nazis came to power. However, only from 1935 on, legislation on foreign currency aimed at...

How should a policy-maker prioritize interventions to improve the public infrastructure with which firms operate and how large are the benefits from doing so likely to be? To address these questions we use survey data on the obstacles arising from poor quality public inputs that managers face in...

We use data from over 20,000 firms in 60 countries to identify constraints on the growth of firms. We interpret managers’ answers to survey questions on the extent to which various aspects of their external environment inhibit the performance of their firm as measuring the shadow cost of...

A stable international monetary system has emerged since the early 1990s. A large number of industrial and a growing number of developing countries now have domestic inflation targets administered by independent and transparent central banks. These countries place few restrictions on capital...

Crowding-out during the British Industrial Revolution has long been one of the leading explanations for slow growth during the Industrial Revolution, but little empirical evidence exists to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided, and that the...

Following the economic and political reforms international private capital started flowing into the emerging market economies of Central and Eastern Europe reducing the official capital flows to the region. The composition of private capital flows showed continuous dominance of direct equity...