In advanced economies interest rates generally vary inversely with the borrower's socio-economic status, because status tends to depend inversely on default risk. Both of these relationships depend critically on the impartiality of the law. Specifically, they require a lender to be able to sue a...

In the literature, there are few studies on the impacts of the railroad construction in the Middle Eastern countries as well mixed findings. Using the data on the population of judicial districts in the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1914, we examine the relationship between railroad access and...

The main achievement of this paper is to introduce a new construction of population data for the territory within the current borders of Turkey. The broad coverage of the reconstruction includes the population in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. I also provide entirely new...

While philanthropy is seen as a critical instrument for wealth redistribution in countries with low state capacity or weak welfare institutions, there is little empirical evidence of its distributional consequences. How does philanthropic public good provision affect inequalities in access to...