This paper presents an exemplary case of social capital destruction through state action. We investigate the patterns of economic backwardness in East Germany and put forward a formal model and empirical evidence in favor of an intuitive yet novel conjecture: the differences in the scale and...

Inspired by scholarship on the free city-state experience in North Italy at the turn of the first millennium, I analyze whether present-day levels of social capital and economic performance in German cities are also explicable by reference to social patterns that emerged during a period of...