We study the emergence of urban self-governance during the Commercial Revolution in the 12th- 13th century and show that municipal autonomy shaped national institutions over the subsequent centuries. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and build a novel comprehensive dataset of...

This paper develops an analytical framework for studying colonial investment from the perspective of neoclassical political economy. The distinguishing feature of colonial investment in this model is that the metropolitan government restricts the amount of investment in the colony in order to...

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized U.S. science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the U.S. we compare changes in patenting by U.S. inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting...

We study the link between fiscal austerity and Nazi electoral success. Voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities for four elections between 1930 and 1933 shows that areas more affected by austerity (spending cuts and tax increases) had relatively higher vote shares for the Nazi...

Scholars have attempted to explain geographic clustering in inventive activity by arguing that it is connected with clustering in production or new investment. They have offered three possible reasons for this link: because invention occurs as a result of learning by doing; because new...