Which role did educational investments play for economic development? Using data on schooling quantity and quality provided by the first and second Prussian census on primary schools and two measures capturing the high and the low end of the income distribution allows applying a value-added...

We generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...

What is the effect of state capacity on economic development? I argue that strong and centralised states are capable of mobilising the resources required to establish an efficient administration and provide public goods, which are preconditions for modern economic growth. To test this...

<Para ID="Par1">Large, extensively diversified pyramidal business groups of listed firms dominate the histories of developed economies and the economies of developing economies. While such groups (called zaibatsu in Japan) are thought to have provided coordination for big push growth successfully in...</para>

A review of the literature on historical comparisons of levels of development suggests that disparities between now and advanced and lagging countries around 1760 were most likely quite small and, if extreme observations at both ends are excluded, probably nonexistent. When purchasing power...

A collection of eighteen articles have been purposely chosen to demonstrate the development of the original and significant contributions of my research over the period 1990 to 2008. Despite the relatively large number of articles, which cover a range of related issues, there is a surprisingly...