Douglass North gehört zu den führenden Sozialwissenschaftlern des 20. Jahrhunderts. Er wurde für seine bahnbrechenden Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der ökonomischen Geschichtstheorie mit dem Nobelpreis ausgezeichnet. Dieser Aufsatz rekonstruiert (a) seine kliometrische Diagnose der Moderne, (b)...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

Few social scientists have equaled the impact on political science of Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993. His extraordinary influence emanated from his ideas but was also a result of his vast social network of collaborators, students, and friendly...

Re-coinage implies that old coins are declared invalid and exchanged for new ones at fixed exchange rates and dates. Empirical evidence shows that re-coinage could occur as often as twice a year within a currency area in the Middle Ages. The exchange fee at re-coinage worked as a monetary tax...

Archaeology and numismatics have long been familiar with the phenomenon of periodic re-coinage (renovatio monetae), which dominated monetary taxation in medieval Europe for almost 200 years. However, this form of monetary taxation is seldom, if ever, discussed in the literature of economics or...