Language is a strong and robust determinant of international trade patterns: Countries sharing a common language trade significantly more with each other than countries using different languages, holding other factors constant. In this paper, we show that this trade-promoting effect of language...

Why do borders still matter for economic activity? The reunification of Germany in 1990 provides a unique natural experiment for examining the effect of political borders on trade both in the cross-section and over time. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid formation of a political and...

When did Germany become economically integrated? Within the framework of a gravity model, based on a new data set of about 40,000 observations on trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 – 1933, I explore the geography of trade costs across Central Europe....

The paper examines the timing of exit from the interwar gold-exchange standard for a panel of European countries, based on monthly data over the period January 1928 - December 1936. I show that exit from gold can be understood in terms of a trade-off between a limited set of factors commonly...

A large literature on “border effects” in the wake of McCallum (1995) documents the massive impact of borders on trade. However, all these studies suffer from an identification problem. “Border effects” are usually identified from cross-sectional variation alone. We do not know how trade...

This paper describes the monetary policy response of countries during the inter-war period. How did central banks react to the Great Depression? How did countries balance the externals demands of the gold standard with domestic policy pressures? What was the optimal level of international policy...

This paper seeks to reconcile two seemingly contradictory strands in the literature on economic development in the late nineteenth century Habsburg Empire - one emphasizing the centrifugal impact of rising intra-empire of nationalism, the other stressing significant improvements in market...

In this paper I survey and reinterpret the extensive literature on Europe's Great Depression. I argue that Europe could not exploit her vast economic potential after 1918, because the war had not yet come to an end - indeed it did not end before 1945. Both, domestic and international...

Hosting a mega-event is a costly activity of short duration. Still, cities frequently compete to become host of all types of events. This paper examines the effect of staging the largest and most important sporting event in the world, the Summer Olympic Games, on the host city. Applying a...

Multinational institutions face an important trade-off when hiring personnel. On the one hand, hiring decisions are based, as in most organizations, on a candidate’s professional qualifications. On the other hand, multinational institutions often aim for broad national representation....