We present new data documenting medieval Europe’s Commercial Revolution” using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany’s first...

This paper explores the causal relationship between female education and teenage fertility by exploiting a change in the compulsory schooling law (CSL) in Turkey. Using variation in the exposure to the CSL across cohorts and variation across provinces by the intensity of additional classrooms...

The reasons why inventions that shaped industrial revolutions, occurred in the UK and in the USA, have been suggested by economic historians. For the first time,we access the determinants of more than a hundred inventions around the world, explaining why they occurred in a given country and why...

Can television be used to teach and foster entrepreneurship among youth in developing countries? We report from a randomized control field experiment of an edutainment show on entrepreneurship broadcasted over almost three months on national television in Tanzania. The field experiment involved...

This study reviews the impact of the global financial crisis on public service delivery in the Republic of Moldova. It provides a background of the country’s development in the period prior to the crisis (2000 to 2007/2008) and presents the factors which determined the country’s fiscal...

We present new data documenting medieval Europe's "Commercial Revolution'' using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany's first...

This paper constructs and index of regulatory quality for improving financial inclusion for the purpose of assessing and comparing the quality of rules and regulations in a sample of eight Latin American countries. The index comprises 11 regulatory practices classified into three categories:...

In this paper, I examine whether the "role model effect" of female politicians on adolescent girls' school enrollment comes only from female representation in the lowest level of local government. To do this, I exploit variation in the implementation of seat quotas for women applied to a...

This research explores the origins of observed differences in time preference across countries and regions. Exploiting a natural experiment associated with the expansion of suitable crops for cultivation in the course of the Columbian Exchange, the research establishes that pre-industrial...

The literature on the effects of natural resources on education is mixed and inconclusive. In this paper, we adopt an innovative approach by exploring the effects of mineral discoveries and productions on intergenerational educational mobility (IM), linking parents to the children education...