The development of capital markets in medieval Europe was shaped for centuries by the religious ban on lending money at interest. This paper examines how this prohibition developed as the outcome of strategic behavior by religious, commercial and political elites. A model is developed to analyze...

Home advantage in football varies over time. Existing theories of home advantage struggle to explain this time-series variation. We argue that the decline in home advantage in English football since the mid-1980s was partly caused by the advent of televised football. We argue that the increase...

Imperial China used an empire-wide system of examinations to select civil servants. Using a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator, we show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To...

This paper explores the rise of the fiscal state in the early modern period and its impact on legal capacity. To measure legal capacity, we establish that witchcraft trials were more likely to take place where the central state had weak legal insti- tutions. Combining data on the geographic...

In pre-industrial economies labor supply curves bent backwards at very low levels of income. This changed in England before the industrial revolution (de Vries, 1994, 2008; Voth, 1998). Using a model of labor supply where consumption takes time, this paper shows that both an increase in the cost of...

Can the market provide law enforcement? This paper addresses this question by analyzing an historical case study: the system of private prosecutions that prevailed in England prior to the introduction of the police. I examine why this system came under strain during the Industrial Revolution,...

How is rule of law established? We address this question by exploring the effect of increases in fiscal capacity on the establishment of well-enforced, formal, legal standards in a preindustrial economy. Between 1550 and 1700, there were over 2,000 witch trials in France. Prosecuting a witch...

In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income.  This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993), Voth (1998, 2000)).  This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour...