In historical accounts of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, Switzerland is known for its staunch defense of the gold standard and the rise of corporatist policies. Yet, so far, the literature has not discussed the implications of these two features. This paper tries to show how the...

The paper re-examines Sweden’s price level targeting during the 1930s which is regarded as a precursor of today’s inflation targeting. According to conventional wisdom the Riksbank was the first central bank to adopt price level targeting as the guideline for its activities, although in...

Applying stochastic frontier analysis, we estimate the importance of sports in society as technical efficiency of countries in the production of Olympic success since the 1950s. Our measures of success are medal shares and a broader concept including Olympic diplomas. Following Bernard and Busse...

Although Unified Growth Theory presumes the existence of the Maltusian mechanism in pre-industrial England recent empirical studies challenged this assumption. This paper studies the interaction of vital rates and real wages in the period from 1540 to 1870 in England. We employ time-varying...

The article re-examines Sweden's price-level targeting during the 1930s which is regarded as a precursor of today's inflation targeting. According to conventional wisdom, the Riksbank was the first central bank to adopt price-level targeting, although in practice giving priority to exchange-rate...

Class specific mortality in 17th and 18th Century Vienna shows a cyclical pattern which is related to grain price cycles in the 5-10 years range. This relationship is not stable over time. Applying spectral analysis based on time-varying VARs, it can be shown that at the beginning of the...

Using a two-sector endogenous growth model, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate cycles in output, consumption, investment and hours. To contextualize our findings, we also assess whether the human capital...

This paper examines the role of religious denomination for human capital formation. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to examine the quantitative macroeconomic implications of counter- cyclical fiscal policy for France, Germany and the UK. The model incorporates real wage rigidity which is the particular market failure justifying policy...

This paper recasts Temin's (1976) question of whether monetary forces caused the Great Depression in a modern time series framework. We analyze money-income causalities and predict U.S. output in a recursive Bayesian framework, allowing for information updating and time-varying coefficients. The...