This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data...

Motivated by the lack of previous research on historical inequality in Central Europe, this paper constructs wealth inequality statistics for a larger town in South Bohemia, Budweis. The data sources are rare detailed local tax censuses from 1416 and 1523 and a national tax register from 1654 as...

What was the impact of urban political structure on economic inequality in preindustrial times? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher economic inequality in a panel of early modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that...

Most creatives acquire professional talents by learning from others, but in most settings it is difficult to estimate the existence of long-term effects. This paper explores the transmission of skills over a period of more than seven centuries by focusing on the case of music composers. We ask...

We use the Economic Freedom Index (Gwartney, Lawson and Norton 2008) to characterise the institutions of ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. It has been shown that ancient Greece witness improved living conditions for an extended period of time. Athens in the classical period appears to...

In Classical Athens, being at war was much more common than peace. The military expenditures were correspondingly large. The real enigmatic issue, however, is not financial but where they found the manpower needed for this policy. The number of warships (triremes) was so great that there is no...

What effect does political instability in the form of a potential secession from a political union have on business formation? Using new measures of business creation and political instability in Ireland during the late nineteenth-century, we test whether increased political instability arising...

Did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policy-making? Combining MP-level political orientation, derived from all roll call votes in the Prussian parliament (1867–1903), with constituency characteristics, we analyze how local vote...

We show that smaller, regional public financial intermediaries significantly contributed to industrial development, using a new data set of the foundation year and location of Prussian savings banks. This extends the banking-growth nexus beyond its traditional focus on the large universal banks,...

In this article, I use documents obtained from the NatWest Group archives to examine the work of Alexander Shand as a director of Parr's Bank during the period 1909-1918. A Scottish banker, Alexander Shand was recruited by the Japanese government early in his career to instruct Japanese...