This paper examines Gibrat's law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat's law broadly holds even in the face of population doubling every fifty years, an industrial and transport trevolution, and...

This paper argues that transport is more cart than horse, in that transport improvements are not the most important driver of economic growth for most countries. Nevertheless there are circumstances in which transport is particularly important. Big transport breakthroughs - such as replacing...

Kommt der große Crash an den Finanzmärkten, wenn einige große Hedge-Fonds pleite gehen? Und werden demnächst deutsche Unternehmen in großer Zahl von Privatinvestoren übernommen, die Mitarbeiter scharenweise entlassen, die Produktion ins Ausland verlagert, damit enorm hohe...

Will the finance markets experience a crash when some of the big hedge funds go bust? And will we soon be seeing large numbers of German businesses taken over by private investors who then dismiss droves of employees and relocate production abroad so that expectations of enormously high yields...

Do financial crises radicalize voters? We study Germany's banking crisis of 1931, when two major banks collapsed and voting for radical parties soared. We collect new data on bank branches and rm-bank connections of over 5,500 firms and show that incomes plummeted in cities affected by the bank...

Do financial crises radicalize voters? We study Germany's 1931 banking crisis, collecting new data on bank branches and firm-bank connections. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in precrisis exposure to the bank at the center of the crisis, we show that Nazi votes surged in locations more...

Guinnane and Hoffman (subsequently GH) comment on two of our papers: Voigtländer and Voth: "Persecution Perpetuated" (2012, subsequently PP) and Satyanath, Voigtländer and Voth: Bowling for Fascism (2017, subsequently BF). They allege that our econometric results are fragile and depend on...

Do veterans earn less? During WW I, the US organized "the greatest human lottery in history": a random draft of 24 million men. Ultimately, 2.8 million Americans were selected to join the armed forces. We sample 10% of registrants of the 1917 lottery and match these men with the 1930 and 1940 US...