According to the literature, historical episodes of local self-governing institutions can explain why differences in socio-economic performances among different territories can persist over centuries. Such assumption has been tested comparing free city-states (Communes) and feudal towns in...

We explore the long run socio-economic impact of a medieval urban governance setting , the king-owned towns (KOTs). For a town the KOT status implies special fiscal, commercial and administrative prerogatives between the community and the Crown, where such as status could be renovated, modified...

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalizations on government revenues. Using a new dataset on tax revenues for 130 countries between 1792 and 2006 we find that on average countries were able to recover the tax revenues lost by liberalizing trade by using other sources of revenue. There...

This chapter offers a retrospective account of Baumol's contribution in light of its influence on economics and entrepreneurship studies. The first section describes the core arguments of his original paper. The second section discusses its impact on the entrepreneurship discipline. Following...

Institutions - the structures of rules and norms governing economic transactions - are widely assigned a central role in economic development. Yet economic history is still dominated by the belief that institutions arise and survive because they are economically efficient. This paper shows that...

This research exploits novel evidence on current and historical inequality dynamics, as well as an instrumental variable (IV) strategy (founded on historical settler mortality à la Acemoglu et al.), to document the fundamental role of income redistribution through taxes and transfers in...

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...

In pre-industrial Europe, government and the economy developed together, each influencing the other. The development of each was shaped by competition. Governments competed for territory, principally by means of war. Their success depended primarily on their ability to mobilize resources. So...

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...