Economic institutions encompassing increasingly sophisticated concepts of risk-sharing and liability flourished in Europe since the High Middle Ages. These innovations occurred in an environment of fragmented local jurisdictions, not within the framework of the territorial state. In this short...

Most economic historians would surely endorse Paul Romer's view expressed above that technological progress lies at the heart of long run economic growth. Long ago Kuznets identified the epoch of 'modern economic growth' as one where growth came to be driven by scientific and technological...

We find little support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positiverelationship between market power and innovation in 1950’s Britain eventhough many economists and policymakers accepted it at the time. Pricefixingagreements were very widespread prior to the 1956 RestrictivePractices Act and...

The role of technology in the transition from premodern to modern economies in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe is among the major questions in economic history, but it is still poorly understood. A plausible explanation of premodern European technological development must account...

Already in the early 1980s, city officials realised the challenge of structural change for Bremen. It was at this point that decisions were made to initiate a profound ‘change of direction’ in the economic focus of the city (Warsewa, 2006). In the past, Bremen’s economic fortunes had been...

This report draws together evidence fromseven major cities in European countriesthat are experiencing huge change andtransition from being industrial giants,through major decline in industrialmanufacturing, to recovery. The citieswe study all had a high proportion ofmanufacturing jobs until the...

Europe is a continent of cities with a remarkable history of cultural inspiration, wealth creation, social andpolitical dynamism. But in the late-20th century, many former industrial cities entered a period of steep decline,losing most of their manufacturing jobs and many of their economic...

Based on practitioners’ experience of making things work on the ground, severalcommon themes emerged. These themes prompted questions about how success can bereplicated, how to overcome obstacles, and what role government can play.The themes were:• scaling down and linking up;• cutting...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of …financing constraints as a possiblyserious obstacle to innovation by …firms. Direct measures of fi…nancing constraints areemployed using survey data collected by the Banque de France and Eurostat, whichovercomes the problems with the traditional...