Despite the advances in New Institutional Economics about the economic consequences of institutions and legal rules, up to now we have only limited knowledge about the mechanisms of the evolution of law. By combining the main ideas of Evolutionary Economics and New Institutional Economics this...

Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually comes in the shape of social tables: inventories of a range of social groups and their mean incomes. These are frequently reported without adjusting for within-group income dispersion, leading to a systematic downward bias in...

This paper contributes to the understanding of the long-run consequences of Roman rule on economic development. In ancient times, the area of contemporary Germany was divided into a Roman and non-Roman part. The study uses this division to test whether the formerly Roman part of Germany show a...

Piracy in international waters is on the rise again, in particular off the coast of Somalia. While the dynamic game between pirates, ship-owners, insurance firms and the military seems to have reached some kind of equilibrium, piracy risks generating significant negative externalities to third...

Since 1789, mass education has been a key factor in development, enablinglarge numbers of people to escape at least the worst effects of poverty. This paper explores an ancient harbinger of mass education, among Jews in the Roman empire, the basis of Jewish religious education to modern times....