Strange Times. There were back-to-back harvest failures in 1799-1800, coming fast on the heels of the insurrections of 1798. The result was massive and sustained inflation in food prices. The conundrum is why there was so little excess mortality. Our approach is to begin by discussing the...

The East-West gap in the German population is believed to originate from migrants escaping the socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We use newly collected regional data and the combination of a regression discontinuity design in space with a difference-in-differences...

Until the German invasion of Norway 9 April 1940 the Norwegian central bank had been one of the most independent in Western Europe. This article investigates the agency of the Norwegian central bank during the German occupation and compares it with central banks in other German occupied...

In this paper we analyse the economic effects of railway infrastructure at the national level for European countries as well as at the local level for Southeast European cities based on a novel railway database capturing decades of the 19th century up to the early 21th century. A panel fixed...

We investigate how major historical shocks affect regional trajectories of economic activity. To this end, we conduct a comparative analysis of the development of entrepreneurship in East and West Germany after World War II. The introduction of an anti-entrepreneurial socialist economy in East...

We investigate the reasons for the pronounced regional differences of new business formation after the transformation from a socialist planned system to a market economy in East Germany. Relatively high start-up rates are found in regions that had a well-qualified workforce and a relatively high...

We investigate how initial conditions that existed in East Germany at the end of the socialist regime impact regional development during the turbulent shock transition to a market economic system. Our investigation spans a period of almost 30 years. Both the self-employment rate (an indication...

We use large-scale survey data of German speaking villages from the 1930's to investigate drivers of cooperation, gender, and religious norms. Through geographic cluster analysis, we show that inter-regional variation explains only little heterogeneity in norms. Villages in the same physical and...

Die Geschichte des wirtschaftlichen Wiederaufbaus im post-sozialistischen Ostdeutschland nach 1990 ist vor allem mit der viel diskutierten Treuhandanstalt verbunden. Verschiedene Narrative beleuchten langfristige strukturelle Veränderungen, kurzfristige Brüche, mittelfristige Dynamiken sowie...