Banks play a greater role in the German financial system than in the UnitedStates or Britain. Germany s large universal banks are admired by those whoadvocate bank deregulation in the United States. Others admire the universalbanks for their supposed role in corporate governance and industrial...

Economists have reported econometric results that rely on estimates of the population of every country in the world for the past two thousand or more years. The underlying source is usually McEvedy and Jones' Atlas of World Population History, published in 1978. The McEvedy and Jones data have...

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....

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...

We argue that, for a given level of scientific knowledge, tolerance and diversity are conducive to technological creativity and innovation. In particular, we show that variations in innovation within Prussia during the second industrial revolution can be ascribed to differences in religious...