In this essay I would like to confront a number of fundamental puzzles in economic history/development--puzzles that go to the heart of the nature of economic change. They can be broadly classified under two general headings: how to account for the uneven and erratic pattern of both historical...

This paper uses long-run real price and dividends series to investigate for the German stock market the questions asked of the U.S. market by Shiller (1989). It tries to determine in what periods and to what degree the Germanstock market has also possessed "excess volatility" over the past...