The late Middle Ages witnessed the transformation of the county of Holland from a peripheral agrarian region to a highly commercialised and urbanised one. This book examines how the organisation of commodity markets contributed to this remarkable development. Comparing Holland to England and...

The notion of the 'Silk Road' that the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen invented in the 19th century has lost attraction to scholars in light of large amounts of new evidence and new approaches. The handbook suggests new conceptual and methodological tools for researching ancient...

This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the ow of medieval trade between 1346 and 1351. The Black Death struck most areas of Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Based on a modified version of the gravity model, we estimate the speed (in kilometers per day) of transmission...

In the first era of financial globalization (1880-1914), global capital market integration led to substantial net capital movements from rich to poor economies. The historical experience stands in contrast to the contemporary globalization where gross capital mobility is equally high, but did...

During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

In this paper we present a new long-term database on monthly export and import series for 23 economies during 1921-2010 and its first empirical application. Using these data, we analyse the synchronised decline in foreign trade during the recession 2008-09 in a historical perspective. We...

Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human...

This paper studies the market microstructure of pre-industrial Europe. In particular we investigate the institution of the broker in markets and fairs, and develop a unique data set of approximately 1100 sets of brokerage rules in 42 merchant towns in Central and Western Europe from the late...