Based on a letter book of the London Baltic merchant Michael Mitford dating 1703-1707 this paper argues that the ability of merchant networks to secure property rights in long distance trade must be re-evaluated. Contrary to the argument of the New Institutional Economists, these were not...

When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...

This paper revisits Bairoch’s hypothesis that in the late 19th century tariffs were positively associated with growth, as recently confirmed by a new generation of quantitative studies (see O`Rourke (2000), Jacks (2006) and Clemens-Williamson (2002, 2004)). This paper highlights the importance...

The main motivation for regional cooperation in the Western Balkans is provided by the EU, formulating it as conditional for the countries’ EU accession aspirations. Economically, this claim includes the establishment of regional free trade agreements (RTAs) whose direct economic effects are...

Tanzania began serious efforts at reform more than twenty years ago, but the payoff to these – in macroeconomic stability, increased revenue and a rising revenue share – only gathered pace in the last decade. It is vital that the impact on these achievements of the global economic and...

The use of U.S dollar as unit of account, medium of exchange and store of value in Tanzania has raised concerns among policy makers and the general public. This paper attempts to shed some light on the key stylized facts of dollarization in Tanzania and the EAC region. We show that compared to...

This book describes the history and current capabilities of Ethiopia’s leading industrial companies (agribusiness, manufacturing and construction), focusing on 50 key large and mid-size firms. The motivation for the study is to help with the expansion of economic capabilities in the country by...

La Rochelle, the fourth largest slaving port in France in the eighteenth-century, is used as a case study in the application of agency theory to long-distance trade. This analysis explores an area not accounted for in the literature on French commercial practices. Being broadly couched in a New...

This paper examines the economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries on those routes that moved slaves from Sudanic Africa via entrepôts in the Sahel and Sahara to the Maghrib. The commercial framework of this trade was integrated...

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...