The occupation payments made by France to Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944 represent one of the largest recorded international transfers and contributed significantly to financing the overall German war effort. Using a neoclassical growth model that incorporates essential features of the...

I estimate two factor models of Swiss exchange rates during the FirstWorldWar. I have data for five of the primary belligerents: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. At the outbreak of the war, these nations suspended convertibility of their currencies into gold with the promise...

This paper brings together two strands of the economic literature -- that on the finance-growth nexus and that on capital market integration -- and explores key issues surrounding each strand through both institutional/country histories and formal quantitative analysis. We begin with studies of...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question: Are trade and factor flows substitutes? While this sounds like an open invitation for empirical research, hardly any serious econometric work has appeared in the literature. This paper uses history to fill...

We study the role of gender in the evaluation of economic research using submissions to four leading journals. We find that referee gender has no effect on the relative assessment of female- versus male-authored papers, suggesting that any differential biases of male referees are negligible. To...

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation-based indexes that could be used to rank academics. This paper examines how well several such indexes match labor market outcomes using data on the citation records of young tenured economists at 25 U.S. departments. Variants of...

In this paper we evaluate what economists have learned over the past 40 years about the determinants of crime. We base our evaluation on two kinds of evidence: an examination of aggregate data over long time periods and across countries, and a critical review of the literature. We argue that...