We use the elements of a macroeconomic production function—physical capital, human capital, labor, and technology—together with standard growth models to frame the role of religion in economic growth. Unifying a growing literature, we argue that religion can enhance or impinge upon economic...

We discuss the impacts of the Russian invasion on Ukrainian science. Using newly collected data, we show that the war has already had significant effects on science in Ukraine: research papers produced by Ukrainian scientists declined by about 10%, approximately 5% of the most prolific...

Fossil fuels have shaped the European economy since the industrial revolution. We use new long-run panel data to analyse the effect of both, coal and oil on economic growth between 1900 and 2015, exploiting variation at the level of European NUTS2 and NUTS3 regions. We show that the reversal of...

How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common...

Fossil fuels have shaped the European economy since the industrial revolution. In this paper, we analyse the effect of coal and oil on long-run economic growth, exploiting variation at the level of European NUTS-2 and NUTS-3 regions over the last century. We show that an "oil invasion" in the...

Historical city directories are rich sources of micro-geographic data. They provide information on the location of households and firms and their occupations and industries, respectively. We develop a generic algorithmic work flow that converts scans of them into geo- and status-referenced...

Recent empirical evidence has shown that firm’s innovation behavior exhibits high persistency but not much is known about potential contingencies affecting the degree of persistence. This paper focuses on the role of the local knowledge environment and asks how local knowledge spillovers...