Gutenberg's printing press was the great revolution in Renaissance information technology. This paper presents new evidence on media markets, knowledge transmission, and city growth across Europe 1450-1600. The paper construct- s comprehensive firm-level panel data on the number and subjects of...

An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

This paper asks whether Germany was ever an economically integrated area. I explore the geography of trade costs in a new data set of about 40,000 observations on regional trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 – 1933. There are three key results. First, the...

This paper examines the role of currency and banking in the German financial crisis of 1931 for both Germany and the U.S. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find that monetary transmission through...

This paper presents annual estimates of total and per-capita GDP at 1910 prices for the regions of Imperial Austria from the origin of the Dual Monarchy (1867) to the eve of WWI (1913). The time paths of regional GDP are estimated from the yield of the tax on the transfer of real and financial...

We argue on theoretical grounds that obligatory compliance with stricter financial reporting rules (e.g. the US Sabanes-Oxley Act) may entail important unintended consequences. Paradoxically, the amount of misreporting may increase because corporate boards spend more valuable resources...

The financial crisis has generated a deep revision of the regulation of securities and derivatives markets. In this paper, we critically examine the extent to which current reforms, such as the European Market Infrastructure Regulation and the proposed new Markets in Financial Instruments...

In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition has increasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media. The term ¿informal sector¿ has been used to describe an extremely wide spectrum of activities, which do not necessarily have much in common, such as...