In the context of interwar Poland, we find that Jews tended to be more literate than non-Jews, but show that this finding is driven by a composition effect. In particular, most Jews lived in cities and most non-Jews lived in rural areas, and people in cities were more educated than people in...

By merging individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth century with county level information on literacy and income tax revenues we show that increases in the stock of human capital not only improved workers ́productivity but also accelerated innovative...

In the mid 19th century, pre-colonial Korea under the Joseon dynasty was increasingly isolated and lagging behind in its economic development. Joseon Korea was forced to sign unequal treaties with foreign powers as a result of which Christian missionaries entered the country and contributed to...

We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live...

This paper studies the impact of Muslim rule on human capital development. Using a unique novel dataset containing yearly data on Muslim presence in the period 711-1492 and literacy rate in 1900 for about 7500 municipalities in Spain, we estimate the local impact of the length of Muslim rule in...

This paper examines the long run education and labor market effects from early-life exposure to the Greek 1941-42 famine. Given the short duration of the famine, we can separately identify the famine effects for cohorts exposed in utero, during infancy and at one year of age. We find that...

This paper estimates the returns to household income due to improved access to electricity in rural India. We examine the effect of connecting a household to the grid and the quality of electricity, defined as hours of daily supply. The analysis is based on two rounds of a representative panel...

This study examines the effect of smallholder farmers' access to a formal climate risk transfer mechanism on their risk preferences. Survey and experimental data were collected from smallholder farmers that have access to weather index-based crop insurance (WICI) in Ethiopia. We use an...

We evaluate the impact of a major European state aid programme for broadband deployment applied to rural areas in the German state of Bavaria in the years 2010 and 2011. Using matched difference-in-differences estimation strategies, we find that aided municipalities have - depending on broadband...