Why do borders still matter for economic activity? The reunification of Germany in 1990 provides a unique natural experiment for examining the effect of political borders on trade both in the cross-section and over time. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid formation of a political and...

When did Germany become economically integrated? Within the framework of a gravity model, based on a new data set of about 40,000 observations on trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 - 1933, I explore the geography of trade costs across Central Europe. There...

We provide the first long-run dataset of regional employment structures and regional GDP and GDP per capita in 1990 international dollars, stretching over more than 100 years. These data allow us to compare regions over time, among each other, and to other parts of the world. After some brief...

The paper examines the timing of exit from the interwar gold-exchange standard for a panel of European countries, based on monthly data over the period January 1928 - December 1936. I show that exit from gold can be understood in terms of a trade-off between a limited set of factors commonly...

In this paper I survey and reinterpret the extensive literature on Europe's Great Depression. I argue that Europe could not exploit her vast economic potential after 1918, because the war had not yet come to an end - indeed it did not end before 1945. Both, domestic and international...