This paper studies the characteristics of investment in slave trade and associated trades in France during the eighteenth century. The study of the accounts of an investor from Nantes, Bertrand de Cœuvre, shows that his investment compared favourably with domestic alternatives. It was more...

Over many millennia, mankind has laboured to consume and satisfy three very necessary material wants or needs: food (including drink), shelter, and clothing. Each of these, however, has also been a major object of luxury consumption in most European societies. Textiles were necessities in...

This paper explores the determinants of intelligence by focusing on the role played by barriers to the diffusion of competence and human capital. The results based on cross-sectional data from 167 countries consisting of 1996-2009 averages suggest that, genetic distance to global frontiers has a...

Major nuclear accidents as recently in Fukushima set nuclear power plant security at the top of the public agenda. Using data of the German Socio-Economic Panel we analyze the effects of the Fukushima accident and a subsequent government decision on nuclear power phase-out on several measures of...

The common European electricity market requires both market integration and transmission grid expansion, including trans-border interconnectors. Although the benefits of increased interconnectivity are widely acknowledged, expansion of interconnectors is often very slow. This paper gathers...

Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographic isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that pre-historic geographical isolation has been beneficial to...

This paper studies the impact of the construction of hydropower facilities on labor market outcomes in Norway at the turn of the twentieth century (1891-1920). The sudden breakthrough in hydropower technology provides a quasi-experimental setting, as not all municipalities had suitable natural...

By using the Emirmahmutoglu-Kose bootstrap Granger non-causality method, this study explores the directions of causality among tourist arrivals, tourism receipts, energy consumption and economic growth for the top 10 most-visited countries (France, the USA, Spain, China, Italy, Turkey, Germany,...

Implementation and usage of the latest inventions in information technology provides enterprises better position on the global market. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) presents the innovative information technology that can change and improve many of the enterprises collaboration operations...

As the first to use an archival data set on historical land values of Berlin, Germany, from 1890 to 1936, we exploit exogenous variation in transport technology in order to test the validity of the monocentric city model. Endogenously determining the CBD, we conduct cross-section and...