Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major ‘institutional’ international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

I gruppi dominanti mostrarono prudenza e lungimiranza principalmente quando percepirono la gravità delle situazioni e quei pericoli come incombenti e rovinosi per l’ordine sociale. Anche i rimedi più efficaci furono quelli dettati in prevalenza dai rischi d’instabilità finanziaria e di...

The basic thesis of this article is that the essential origins of the modern ‘financial revolution’ were the late-medieval responses, civic and mercantile, to financial impediments from both Church and State, concerning the usury doctrine, that reached their harmful fruition in the later...

Not all major Italian cities of the late Middle Ages could rely on an established and organised system of public debt like Florence, Venice, Genoa, and others. The study of one such city, Bologna, reveals that whenever the city found itself in serious financial straits, outside of ad hoc...

The connection between public spending and the ambitions of urban elites is a common topic in the historiography of the late Middle Ages. However, it is still unclear how city finances and private capital interacted before the use of sophisticated financial systems of the late 13 th to early 14...

The paper focuses on the role played by state-owned enterprise in the energy history and policy in Italy. A fundamental issue of the economic history of the country is if and how scarcity of raw materials, and particularly of primary energy sources, affected its modern economic growth. As...

We study how cultural distance affects the rejection of imposed institutions. To do so, we exploit the transplantation of Piedmontese institutions on Southern Italy that occurred during the Italian unification. We assemble a novel and unique dataset containing municipal-level information on...

Fiscal innovation and warfare are said to improve state building, but prior to the 15th century they did the opposite: fiscal states deteriorated while non-fiscal states strengthened over time. Why was there a divergence between fiscal and non-fiscal states (especially in conflict) and why did...