China’s long-term economic dynamics pose a formidable challenge to economic historians. The Qing Empire (1644-1911), the world’s largest national economy before 1800, experienced a tripling of population during the 17th and 18th centuries with no signs of diminishing per capita income. While...

This paper empirically examines whether the act of deciding to support a political party can impact partisan leanings years later. We use the discontinuity in the probability of being registered to vote around the 18th birthday to look at the impact of registration after the 9/11/01 attacks on...

We use the global games approach to study key factors a?ecting the credit risk associated with roll-over of bank debt. When creditors are heterogenous, these include the extent of short-term borrowing and capital market liquidity for repo ?nancing. Speci?cally, in a model with a large...

This paper examines the impact of property inheritance rights on education of women. Using plausibly exogenous variation created by amendments to female inheritance laws in India, I nd that exposure to improved inheritance rights increased mean female educational attainment by approximately one...

Using a newly collected dataset on inquisitorial activity for seven regions, fourteen provinces and 947 municipalities, I analyze the long-term economic consequences of the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834). I show that inquisitorial activity is negatively associated to regional and provincial...

We explore the links between openness and economic performance in Britain between 1870 and 1999. The key findings are: (1) As a result of the openness of the British economy, agriculture was unusually small in nineteenth century Britain, allowing resources to be deployed in the higher value...

This paper provides the first annual GDP series for Great Britain over the period 1700-1870. The series is constructed in real terms from the output side, using volume indicators and value added weights. Sectoral estimates are provided for agriculture, industry and services, and for a number of...

This paper provides a simple model to explain effect of political alignment between different tiers of government on policy choices and election outcomes. We derive precise predictions that, as long as voters attribute most of the credit for providing public goods to the local government: (i)...

The changes-in-changes model extends the widely used difference-in-differences to situations where outcomes may evolve heterogeneously. Contrary to difference-in-differences, this model is invariant to the scaling of the outcome. This paper develops an instrumental variable changes-in-changes...

This paper provides a documentation of the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for 19th-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816-1901, with much...