This study provides new evidence on top income shares in Germany from the period of industrialization to the present. Income concentration was high in the nineteenth century, dropped sharply after World War I and during the hyperinflation years of the 1920s, and increased rapidly throughout the...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

Europeans restricted their fertility long before the Demographic Transition. By raising the marriage age of women and ensuring that a substantial proportion remained celibate, the quot;European Marriage Patternquot; (EMP) reduced childbirths by up to one third between the 14th and 18th century....

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious' revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus...

The classical story of industrialization always begins with agriculture: the modernization of rural institutions, involving both the enclosure of 'open fields' and a shift from peasant farming to larger scale capitalist farming, generates a rise in agricultural productivity, which in turn fuels...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...