We study the effects of globalisation on the slope of the New Keynesian Phillips curve for CPI inflation, based on a broad panel of 35 countries and controlling for possibly non-linear exchange rate effects. We find that the output gap generally has a significant positive effect on inflation,...

Did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policy-making? Combining MP-level political orientation, derived from all roll call votes in the Prussian parliament (1867-1903), with constituency characteristics, we analyze how local vote...

Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? We match data on notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical city data. The production and...

This paper offers a meta-regression analysis of the literature on the drivers of financial development. Our results based on 1900 estimates suggest that institutional quality is positively correlated to both private sector credit and stock market capitalization (both as share of GDP). Domestic...

We estimate the ratio of private wealth to national income, βpt, for Switzerland from 1900 to 2020. Our results indicate that over the 20th century, βpt did not follow a U-shaped pattern as in most European countries. Instead, its was exceptionally stable at around 500%. We argue that this...

Richard Musgrave was one of the around 200 academic economists who emigrated from Germany when Fascism came to dominate the country. This memorial lecture traces the German and European roots of Richard Musgrave's oeuvre, trying to shed light on his family background as well as on the political...

The process of matching between firms and workers is an important mechanism in determining the distribution of wages. In a labor market characterised by large dispersion of workers' productivity and worker-firm complementarity, high quality firms have strong incentives to screen for the quality...