How did religious freedom emerge? I address this question by building on the framework of Johnson and Koyama’s Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom (2019). First, I establish that premodern societies, reliant on identity rules, were incapable of liberalism and religious...

Why do some leaders invest in significant nation-building policies and others do not? Why does nation-building occur at certain junctures in time and not others? In our research, we investigate what motivates leaders to nation build. We argue that threats to their regime motivate rulers to...

This chapter evaluates the concept of legal capacity and how it is employed in research in historical political economy. I discuss its relationship to the wider literature on state capacity, research on the rule of law, and the literature on legal origins. I go on to outline how the concept of...

We estimate the self-selection of Mexican migrants into and out of the United States in the 1920s. Officials recorded migrant height on border crossing manifests, which we use to proxy migrant quality and to measure self-selection into migration in 1920. Migrants were positively selected on...

Economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries, following the Industrial Revolutions, was much faster than in preceding centuries. This unprecedented global growth coincided with the global proliferation of democracy, with some evidence for bidirectional causation. Macroeconomic forecasts have...

We hypothesize that financial disintermediation during and after the Great Depression arose from the slow liquidation of failed-bank deposits in the years following financial crises. We construct a data series containing the stock of failed national bank deposits for the period 1921-1940. Our...

Purpose The article examines Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabauwi's initial concept of paper money, which in the early 20th century wrote Risala Raf'u Al-Iltibas. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a qualitative approach based on the critical extraction analysis that can reveal a set of...

This paper examines the evolving effects of England's Old Poor Law (1601-1834). It establishes that poor relief reduced social unrest from around the late-17th century through the turn of the 19th century, at which point it began to spur population growth and its social stability effects...

20 years after unification, the East German twin's economic position is relatively stagnant compared to most of the West German productivity and income variables. The strong initial takeoff until the mid-end 1990s ended at a level of 70% to 80% of the western reference. In this paper, two...

The use of historical data has become a standard tool in economics, serving three main purposes: to examine the influence of the past on current economic outcomes; to use unique natural experiments to test modern economic theories; and to use modern economic theories to refine our understanding...