Industrialization and the rise of nationalism were the two major developments in Germany before the World War I. A novel county-level dataset reveals that industrialization and nationalism measured by membership in the "Kriegervereine'", the biggest civil organization at the time, were...

This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the ow of medieval trade between 1346 and 1351. The Black Death struck most areas of Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Based on a modified version of the gravity model, we estimate the speed (in kilometers per day) of transmission...

This paper studies the economic and political effects of a large trade shock in agriculture – the grain invasion from the Americas – in Prussia during the first globalization (1871-1913). We show that this shock accelerated the structural change in the Prussian economy through migration of...

We revisit Max Weber's hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber's Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late 19th century Prussia we reject Weber's suggestion that Protestantism mattered...

How does revolutionary technological change impact wealth inequality? We turn to the mother of all technological shocks–the Industrial Revolution–and analyze its role for wealth concentration both empirically and theoretically. Based on a novel dataset on wealth shares at the level of...