Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence -- mostly from British textile industries -- however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower...

How do health crises affect election results? We combine a panel of election results from 1893-1933 with spatial heterogeneity in excess mortality due to the 1918 Influenza to assess the pandemic's effect on voting behavior across German constituencies. Applying a dynamic...

How do health crises affect election results? We combine a panel of election results from 1893–1933 with spatial heterogeneity in excess mortality due to the 1918 Influenza to assess the pandemic's effect on voting behavior across German constituencies. Applying a dynamic...

We investigate how the intensity of Ramadan affects educational outcomes by exploiting spatio-temporal variation in annual fasting hours. Longer fasting hours are related to increases in student performance in a panel of TIMMS test scores (1995-2019) across Muslim countries but not other...

We study the e ect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We nd positive short- and long-term e ects of having a station on...

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration,...

Nach den aktuellen Prognosen, die auf der 61. Euroconstruct-Konferenz in Amsterdam im Juni vorgetragen wurden, hat sich die Stimmung im Bausektor deutlich aufgehellt. War man vor einem halben Jahr noch von einer Zunahme der Bauinvestitionen im Jahr 2006 um 1,5% ausgegangen, so wurden in den...

Bereits in den ersten Jahren dieses Jahrzehnts hat sich der Tiefbau gut entwickelt. Nach den Prognosen der Euroconstruct-Institute sind die Aussichten für die Jahre 2006 bis 2008 sogar noch besser: Der gesamte europäische Tiefbaumarkt wuchs 2005 um 1,7%. In diesem Jahr gehen die Schätzungen...