This paper examines the comovement of the stock market and of real activity in Germany before World War I under the efficient market hypothesis. We employ multivariate spectral analysis to compare rivaling national product estimates to stock market behavior in the frequency domain. Close...

This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able to credibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences their decisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

We use a Bayesian dynamic factor model to measure Germany's pre World War I economic activity. The procedure makes better use of existing time series data than historical national accounting. To investigate industrialization we propose to look at comovement between sectors. We find that...

Based on county-level census data for the German state of Bavaria in 1939 and 1946, we use World War II as a natural experiment to study the effects of sex ratio changes on out-of-wedlock fertility. Our findings show that war-induced shortfalls of men to women significantly increased the...