Using ownership and control data for 890 firm-years, this paper examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern-day standards. This implies that ownership...

We present cross-country evidence that a country's macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country's historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of...

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman policy-makers adopted a more liberal attitude towards price formation. This was accompanied by the fiscal and administrative centralization of the grain trade. These seemingly contradictory policy changes could, in part, be explained...

I present a theory to account for the emergence of land rights in a subsistence agricultural economy. An important feature is that, to maximize tax revenue, an authoritarian state must devise land rights to overcome the informational constraint in registering the population for tax collection....