German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Die deutsche Teilung im Jahr 1949 in die DDR und die Bundesrepublik sowie die Wiedervereinigung im Jahr 1990 bieten einen Rahmen, um Auswirkungen des Kommunismus zu analysieren. Niemals zuvor ereignete sich eine derart unerwartete Einführung und Abschaffung eines kommunistischen Regimes auf dem...

Auch zum 30. Jubiläum der Deutschen Einheit ist noch viel von Ost-West-Unterschieden die Rede. Im Vordergrund stehen hierbei neben rein ökonomischen Differenzen auch Unterschiede in soziokulturellen Einstellungen und Verhaltensweisen. Dass diese Diskussionen auch nach so langer Zeit noch...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestantregions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Biblegenerated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. We test the theory using...

While womens employment opportunities, relative wages, and the childquantityquality trade-off have been studied as factors underlyinghistorical fertility limitation, the role of womens education hasreceived little attention. We combine Prussian county data from threecensusesu1816, 1849, and...

The trade-off between child quantity and quality is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed already in the nineteenth century, exploiting a unique...

Do Empires affect human values and behavior long after their demise? In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone border of the Habsburg Empire have been sharing common formal institutions for 90 years now. We exploit this geographic discontinuity in a...

Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence-mostly from British textile industries-however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia...