Do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We study Italian firms and their workers to answer this question. Our analysis uses a brand-new dataset, spanning the period from 1993 to 2014, where we merge: (i) firm-level balance sheet data; (ii) social...

This study investigates the evolution of market integration in Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean and Europe until World War I. We find that market integration levels were the highest in northwest Europe while Ottoman lands were part of the less integrated periphery. Over the centuries, most European...