In this paper we investigate the relation between population, wages and urban population in the Italian economy. During the period examined, 1320-1870, the prevailing conditions were those of a poor, mainly agricultural economy with limited human capital and rudimentary technology. However,...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the sustainability of public debt in Italy during the last 150 years (1861-2010) by employing a database containing several statistical novelties: new time series estimates of public debt and GDP (respectively Bank of Italy and Baffigi, 2011) and an original...

In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....

This paper utilizes data on the presence of prominent individuals—that is, those with political (e.g., Members of Parliament) and aristocratic titles (e.g., lords)--on the boards of directors of English and Welsh banks from 1879-1909 to investigate whether the appointment of well-connected...

This paper sets out a simple spatial model of energy exploitation to ask how the location and productivity of energy resources may affect the distribution of economic activity around the globe. We combine elements from resource and energy economics into one framework linking the spatial...

Increasing-returns-to-scale imperfect competition trade models predict a more than proportionate relationship between the larger country’s share in world endowments and its share in producing firms: the so called home market effect (HME). While this result plays a key role in empirical...

The physical or absolute geography of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is often blamed for its poor economic performance. A country’s location however not only determines its absolute geography, it also pins down its relative position on the globe vis-à-vis other countries. This paper assesses the...

We extent a solvable version of the core-periphery agglomeration model to four countries located in two regions. The paper shows that there might still be a race to the bottom in capital income tax rates despite agglomeration rents earned by the mobile factor. We find that intra-regional tax...

Does temperature affect economic performance? Has temperature always affected social welfare through its impact on physical and cognitive function? While many studies have explored the indirect links between climate and welfare (e.g. agricultural yield, violent conflict, or sea-level rise), few...

The economic expansion of the late 1990s created many opportunities for business creation in Silicon Valley, but the opportunity cost of starting a business was also high during this period because of the exceptionally tight labor market. A new measure of entrepreneurship derived from matching...