How do the media affect public support for democratic institutions in a fragile democracy? What role do they play in a dictatorial regime? We study these questions in the context of Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. During the democratic period, when the Weimar government introduced pro-government...

Partisan conflict and policy uncertainty are frequently invoked as factors contributing to slow post-crisis recoveries. Recent events in Europe provide ample evidence that the political aftershocks of financial crises can be severe. In this paper we study the political fall-out from systemic...

We compare trends in mortality, nutritional status and food supply to other living standard indicators for the early years of the Nazi period. We find that Germany experienced a substantial increase in mortality rates in most age groups in the mid-1930s, even relative to those of 1932, the worst...

1. The Organization of Terror and Murder -- 2. The Modern Theory of Bureaucracy -- 3. Bureaucratic Competition in the Third Reich -- 4. Vertical Trust Networks in the Nazi Bureaucracy -- 5. Horizontal Trust Networks in the Nazi Bureaucracy -- 6. Coercion and Vertical Trust in the Nazi...

1.Italian Economics and Fascism: an Institutional View -- 2. Economists and the Fascist Regime: A Painful Continuity? -- 3 The Persistence of Tradition: The Economists in the Law Faculties and in the Higher Institutes of Business Studies (1922 – 1943) -- 4.The Faculties of Political Sciences...

1. Economic Expertise and Political Militancy under Fascism: an Introduction -- 2. From Nationalism to Fascism: Protagonists and Journals -- 3. Planning and Discussing Corporatism and the “New International Order” -- 4. “Breaking down the Ivory Tower”: Economic Culture in Italian...

The Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation of Italy occurred at a critical juncture, just before the birth of a new democracy. We study the impact of these traumatic events by exploiting geographic heterogeneity in the duration and intensity of civil war, and the persistence of the...