Historical events are reflected in asset prices. In this paper, we analyse government bond prices of Germany and Austria traded on the Swiss bourse during WWII. Some war events that are generally considered crucial are clearly reflected in government bond prices. This holds, in particular, for...

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...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

This paper explores the idea that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by employing a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a principal component analysis, seven aspects of both federalism and...

This paper seeks to reconcile two seemingly contradictory strands in the literature on economic development in the late nineteenth century Habsburg Empire - one emphasizing the centrifugal impact of rising intra-empire of nationalism, the other stressing significant improvements in market...

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

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...