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 address the trade effect of restrictive product standards on the margins of trade, by matching a detailed panel of French firm exports with a new database compiling the list of Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary regulatory measures that have been raised as a concern in dedicated committees of the...

Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations have grown, while middle wage occupations have shrunk. During the same period, the share of...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

How did Britain sustain faster rates of economic growth than comparable European countries, such as France, during the Industrial Revolution? We argue that Britain possessed an important but underappreciated innovation advantage: British inventors worked in technologies that were more central...

In this paper we compare the profitability of a merger to the profitability of a partial ownership arrangement and find that partial ownership arrangements can be more profitable for the acquiring and acquired firm because they can result in a greater dampening of competition. We also derive...

A "conservation good" (such as a tropical forest) is owned by a seller who is tempted to consume (or cut), but a buyer benefits more from conservation. The seller does conserve if the buyer is expected to buy, but the buyer is unwilling to pay as long as the seller conserves. This contradiction...