We present a two-country version of Hansen and Prescott's two-sector long-run growth model, introducing war by letting the countries take land from each other, at the cost of destroying capital and killing people. Because land is an input only in the Malthus sector the transition to a Solow...

With two news-based measures on war, I document that managers mitigated war risk through dividend cuts, arguably to establish a war chest. Moreover, I find that companies postponed their initial public offerings and that foreign companies were more likely to delist after the onset of wars....

Did the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars contribute to the Industrial Revolution? Recent scholarship argues warfare was an important factor in explaining Britain's industrialisation, by encouraging the invention and diffusion of key technologies with military applications. I re-examine...

Warfare is an important and common subject in discussions on mercantilism. However, the idea of a mercantilist (type of) warfare rarely appears in the specialized literature. This article begins with a historiographical review of the uses of mercantilist warfare. It identifies mercantilist...

World War I led to radical changes in the government policy of participating countries. The enormous demographic and economic disturbances caused by the war forced the governments of all the belligerent nations to drastically restrict the market freedom. In particular, the state began actively...

The Ottoman Empire had a profound impact in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa at the apogee of its power, covering the era between 1453 C. E. and 1699 C. E. In this paper, I exploit the empire's unique culture and institutions to examine the roles of ethnicity and religion in conflict and...

Did the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars contribute to the Industrial Revolution? Recent scholarship argues warfare was an important factor in explaining Britain's industrialisation, by encouraging the invention and diffusion of key technologies with military applications. I re-examine...

Do states experience more peace under female leadership? We examine this question in the context of Europe over the 15th-20th centuries. We instrument queenly rule using gender of the first born and whether the previous monarchs had a sister. We find that polities led by queens participated in...

Can religiosity sway a society's propensity for violence against outgroups? We first introduce two state-year-level religiosity measures for several pre-Enlightenment European states with the frequencies of (i) religious language in book publications and (ii) Christian names of newborns. To...

Can religiosity sway a society's propensity for violence against outgroups? We first introduce two state-year-level religiosity measures for several pre-Enlightenment European states with the frequencies of religious language in book publications and Christian names of newborns. To identify...