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...

Matching has become a popular approach to estimate average treatment effects. It is based on the conditional independence or unconfoundedness assumption. Checking the sensitivity of the estimated results with respect to deviations from this identifying assumption has become an increasingly...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

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...

The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique...

The Ifo Institute for Economic Research has been conducting regular business surveys since its foundation in 1949. The most well-known of Ifo's surveys is the Ifo Business Survey (ifo Konjunkturtest). The micro data of the Ifo Business Survey are accessible to external researchers on-site at Ifo...

Das ifo Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in München führt seit seiner Gründung im Jahr 1949 regelmäßige Unternehmensbefragungen durch. Bisher bestand kein institutionalisierter Datenzugang zu den Mikrodaten für Forscher außerhalb des Institutes. Die Mikrodaten werden nunmehr im ifo...