How deep are the roots of Latin America's economic inequalities? In this chapter we survey both the history and the literature about the region's extreme economic disparities, focusing on the most recent academic contributions. We begin by documenting the broad patterns of national and...

We test several hypotheses concerning the growth of public expenditure by the Austrian monarchy between 1870 and 1913 in relation to Wagner's law, as well as the impact of increasing public indebtedness and the expanding role of the Imperial Council towards the end of the analyzed period, using...

Bilateral and regional free trade agreements increasingly substitute for the World Trade Organization in trade negotiations. Accordingly, civil society organisations opposed to trade liberalisation target this new generation of trade agreements as well. This paper examines the case of activists...

The demonetisation exercise announced by the PM on November 8, 2016, aimed to tackle the problems of black money, fake currency, corruption, and terror funding. With time, more targets were added such as the creation of a cashless economy, curbing real estate prices, and broadening the taxpayer...

This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid endogeneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with an instrument based on the...

In this paper, we add new evidence to a long-debated macroeconomic question, namely whether money growth has predictive power for inflation or, put differently, whether money growth Granger causes inflation. We use a historical dataset - consisting of annual Swedish data on money growth and...

The public mechanical clock and the movable type printing press were two of the most important and complex general purpose technologies of the late medieval period. We document two of their most important, yet unforeseeable, consequences. First, an instrumental variables analysis indicates that...

This research examines the economic origins of Islam and uncovers two empirical regularities. First, Muslim countries, virtual countries and ethnic groups, exhibit highly unequal regional agricultural endowments. Second, Muslim adherence is systematically larger along the pre-Islamic trade...