This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly is one of the best, if not the best, books ever written on the history of financial crises. It presents a comprehensive survey of financial crises utilizing an extraordinary database of macroeconomic and financial series. The massive...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...