The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

We investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (partition vs. primogeniture)....

For a panel of 122 cities observed over 300 years in medieval northern-central Italy, we document that the occurrence of an earthquake retarded institutional transition from the feudal regime to the commune (free city state) in cities where the political and the religious leaders were one and...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

This paper studies the determinants of house prices in eight transition economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE) and 19 OECD countries. The main question addressed is whether the conventional fundamental determinants of house prices, such as GDP per capita, real interest rates, housing...

This paper explores the impact of the exchange rate regime on inflation and output in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) EU candidate countries. The panel estimations for the period between 1994 and 2002 show that de facto measures of exchange rate stability have a better explanatory power...