Showing 1 - 10 of 353
Democracy is not an absorbing state; transitions to autocratic rule have been frequent throughout history and often …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012458514
Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to the literature exploring the "dark side" of social capital, examining the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We collect new data on the density of associations in 229 German towns...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459462
How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012461544
Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012533315
of the rise of Fascism in inter-war years. In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of … support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and the subsequent emergence of Fascism in Italy. We first develop a … elites played an important role in the rise of Fascism. Finally, we find greater likelihood of Jewish deportations in 1943 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481158
Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized U.S. science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the U.S. we compare changes in patenting by U.S. inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012458702
The current historical consensus on the economic causes of the inexorable Nazi electoral success between 1930 and 1933 suggests this was largely related to the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression (high unemployment and financial instability). However, these factors cannot fully account...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453607
Using novel microdata, we document an unintended, first-order consequence of the Protestant Reformation: a massive reallocation of resources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual framework in which the introduction of religious competition shifts...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453780
What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482449
We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part shaped by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In an environment with weak state presence, this socialist threat triggered landholders, estate managers and local politicians to turn to the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453598