What was the impact of urban political structure on economic inequality in preindustrial times? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher economic inequality in a panel of early modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that...

Most creatives acquire professional talents by learning from others, but in most settings it is difficult to estimate the existence of long-term effects. This paper explores the transmission of skills over a period of more than seven centuries by focusing on the case of music composers. We ask...

In this paper, we mainly focus on two institutional aspects that are related to financial risk, that is, profiteering and the use of non-fraudulent coins when performing financial transactions. We argue that these two prerequisites were important for the success of the commercially oriented...

Around 600 B.C., Athens was ruled by a birth aristocracy. Some 150 years later, the city-state was a "democracy". A rational-actor perspective, as perceived in the new institutional economics, sheds additional light on this intriguing transformation by focussing our attention on the incentives...

This paper explores the mutual influence between the institutional development in Athens in the archaic and classical periods and the contemporary changes in economic life. This enhances our understanding of the causes and consequences of institutional change. It is also worth exploring in view...

We use the Economic Freedom Index (Gwartney, Lawson and Norton 2008) to characterise the institutions of ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. It has been shown that ancient Greece witness improved living conditions for an extended period of time. Athens in the classical period appears to...

Perikles is usually seen as a great statesman and clever leader of the Athenians. In the mid fifth century BC, he seems however to have been in serious political trouble and may well have been in danger of losing the struggle for power and of being ostracised. The fact that his incentives...

The specific way the Athenians set up their democracy presents both theoretical and empirical challenges. Decisions were taken by majority vote in the Assembly. To keep politicians in line, the Athenians first used ostracism, which however was replaced by the graphe paranomon around 415 BCE. The...

In Classical Athens, being at war was much more common than peace. The military expenditures were correspondingly large. The real enigmatic issue, however, is not financial but where they found the manpower needed for this policy. The number of warships (triremes) was so great that there is no...

Does self-governance, a hallmark of democratic societies, foster or erode norms of generalized cooperation? Does this effect persist, and if so, why? I investigate these questions using a natural experiment in Switzerland. In the middle-ages, the absence of an heir resulted in the extinction of...