This study establishes a link between medieval trade, agglomeration and contemporary regional development in ten European countries. It documents a statistically and economically significant positive relationship between prominent involvement in medieval trade and regional economic development...

This paper proposes a novel strategy for identifying the effects of import competition on economic outcomes that avoids standard concerns related to the endogeneity of trade policy and provides a consistent measure of exposure to trade over time. Conditioning on the level of import tariffs, our...

This paper examines Japan's response to ‘external pressure', mainly from Europe and the US, focussing on the ‘mercantile response' by merchants and financiers. Before the beginning of free trade in 1859, many money exchange merchants in Osaka transacted with merchants and wealthy farmers...

This paper analyzes how free trade and mercantilism had confronted to each other in the Ottoman Empire and how free trade in the Ottoman Empire had yielded to mercantilism. It particularly, analyzes the case of Aleppo a trading city in the Ottoman Empire. Aleppo evidences that how its liberal...