What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

We take Gary Becker's child quantity-quality trade-off hypothesis to the historical record, investigating the causal link from family size to the literacy status of offspring using data from Anglican parish registers, c. 1700-1830. Extraordinarily for historical data, the parish records enable...

The main goal of this paper is to provide an integrated overview of the literature devoted to identifying the causes of the British industrial revolution. Why did the industrial revolution, a fascinating and multifaceted event which brought about modern economic growth, occur in...

New institutional economics lacks a theory of state formation which could help us to deal with the mega question of why some states became more efficient than others at establishing and and sustaining institutions. Some kind of middle range theory could be formulated based upon historical case...

The return to economic liberalism in the Anglo-Saxon world was motivated by the apparent failure of Keynesian economic management to control the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the theories of economic liberalism, championed by Friederich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and...

This chapter offers a twofold shift in the application of the ‘credible commitment' concept laid down by North and Weingast in their classic 1989 article. It examines the concept in the context of charter-granting, rather than in that of the national debt and the government bond market, and...

This article analyzes the Directive on Temporary Agency Work (2008) in the face of a new internal market in services in the European Union. I argue that the adoption of this Directive is paradoxical: on the one hand, it breaks the lengthy stalemate characterizing workers' and employers' efforts...

This paper investigates whether uncertainty about economic policy plays a role in shaping the credibility and reputation of the central bank in the eyes of the public. In particular, we look at the effect of policy uncertainty for the dynamics of citizens' opinion, being trust, satisfaction or...

This paper investigates whether uncertainty about economic policy plays a role in shaping the credibility and reputation of the central bank in the eyes of the general public. In particular, we look at the effect of policy uncertainty for the dynamics of citizens' opinion, being trust,...