Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did not mobilize their armies until it was too late. This...

This paper shows that geographical investor heterogeneity strongly influences sovereign risk. While standard sovereign debt models mainly attribute the absence of sovereign defaults to foreign creditor retaliation, a new theoretical literature argues that domestic creditors also affect borrowing...

This study shows empirically that the political costs of sovereign default can differ considerably for domestic and external debt. The analysis uses new evidence from Danish and Swedish bond markets around World War II, a time when markets went from being fully integrated to fully segmented...

The objective of this paper is to study the dynamics of the wealth distribution over the path of economic development. More specifically, we are interested in distinguishing between changes which seem to be country specific and characteristics shared by all countries. A historical account of the...

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and lasting boosting impacts on top income shares from the progressivity reductions. Effects are...