Summary The rise of the East-German economy in the 1950s and 1960s and its decline in the 1970s and 1980s is difficult to explain by neoclassical economics. However; the observed life cycle may be explained by the inclusion of concepts from old and new institutional economics and from functional...

Evidence of falling wages in Catholic cities and rising wages in Protestant cities between 1500 and 1750, during the spread of literacy in the vernacular, is inconsistent with most theoretical models of economic growth. In The Protestant Ethic, Weber suggested an alternative explanation based on...

The rise of the East-German economy in the 1950s and 1960s and its decline in the 1970s and 1980s is difficult to explain by neoclassical economics. However, the observed life cycle may be explained by the inclusion of concepts from old and new institutional economics and from functional...

Post reunification estimates of East German per capita income were barely one-half the officially reported level. This paper tries to explain this discrepancy and to account for the implied postwar economic divergence between the two Germanies. The statistical discrepancy is attributed to a...