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...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

According to Gibrat’s law for cities, population shocks have permanent effects on city size. I examine this implication by analysing the persistence of observed population shocks: German military casualties in WWI by municipality of birth. I find a strong negative effect of military casualties...

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in...

The Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, was a first-order economic shock. We document its effects on the sectoral allocation of economic activity in Germany using highly disaggregated data. During the Reformation, particularly in Protestant regions, large numbers of monasteries were...

Weimar achieved urban recovery as a "consumer city" with sub-brandings like a population magnet with a high living-quality, a cultural city with touristic attractions, and a university city. Its intensive cultural promotion policies combined with urban regeneration programs have contributed to...

We investigate the impact on mortality of the world's first compulsory health insurance, established by Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Empire, in 1884. Employing a multi-layered empirical setup, we draw on international comparisons and difference-indifferences strategies using...

The quasi-exogenous division of the French regions Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco- Prussian War allows us to provide evidence about group identity formation within historically homogeneous regions. We use several measures of stated and revealed preferences at the municipal-level in a...

The Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation of Italy occurred at a critical juncture, just before the birth of a new democracy. We study the impact of these traumatic events by exploiting geographic heterogeneity in the duration and intensity of civil war, and the persistence of the...

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....