The U.S. student privacy legal landscape over the past 45 years tells a story of unintended consequences that have required legislative clarifications and changes. This story makes a case for nuance and careful deliberation in drafting laws and creating a long-term culture of privacy that...

The previously successful British merchant houses on the west coast of South America faced significant problems between the two world wars. Earlier historians have referred to difficulties such as the volatility of commodity prices, the organisation and structure of the firms, and changes in...

The previously successful British merchant houses on the west coast of South America faced significant problems between the two world wars. Earlier historians have referred to difficulties such as the volatility of commodity prices, the organisation and structure of the firms, and changes in...

Innovations in the finance industry are an important tool to enhance profitability and to increase a nation's wealth. It, therefore, is not astonishing that there is much empirical work on innovations in finance. Most of the work however is concerned with the design of innovative products. The...

We present cross-country evidence that a country's macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country's historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of...

This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We use three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920; a dataset of the employment, location and patents of firms active in R&D since 1921; and a...

This paper shows that railroad building in Russia, as in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, improved the value of land, a classic benefit of transportation investment in largely agrarian countries. From a database constructed for this paper, we use cross-sectional data for the fifty...

What factors affect the diffusion of new economic institutions? This paper examines this question exploiting the introduction of the first regularized patent system which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474. We begin by developing a model which links patenting activity of craft guilds with...

What factors affect the diffusion of new economic institutions? This paper examines this question by exploiting the introduction of the first regularized patent system, which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474. We begin by developing a model that links patenting activity of craft guilds...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. Developing countries are currently making huge investments in electrification, with a view to achieving structural change. What does history say about its impact on the structure of employment? We...