This paper analyzes an early modern German economy to test alternative theories about guilds. It finds little evidence to support recent hypotheses arguing that guilds corrected market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation. But it finds that guilds were social networks...

The paper shows that a comparison of the appropriately-weighted sum of households marginal willingness to pay for a public good with the net effect of the increased supply of the public good on shadow, as distinct from actual, government revenue is a generally valid rule for public good...

This paper investigates Becker, Hornung and Woessmann's recent claim that education had an important causal effect on Prussian industrialization and finds it unwarranted. The econometric analysis on which this claim is based suffers from severe problems, notably the omission of relevant...