All the extant interpretations of united Italy's early industrial development focus on the long swing in industrial investment evident in the familiar indices of the engineering industry's aggregate product. Disaggregated production series for that industry have now been compiled. The evidence...

Although European economic history provides essentially no support for the view that education of the general population has a positive causal effect on economic growth, a recent paper by Becker, Hornung and Woessmann (Education and catch-up in the Industrial Revolution, 2011) claims that such...

This paper uses a historical setting to study when religion can be a barrier to the diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I focus on 19th-century Catholicism and analyze a crucial phase of modern economic growth, the Second Industrial Revolution...