We exploit education reforms in Sweden and other European countries to estimate the causal effects of longer and modernized compulsory education on civic engagement. In most countries, compulsory education was extended by 1-2 years, and the curricula were reformed to better foster democratic and...

This paper explores the determinants of female labor supply over the course of Italy’s post-unification history (1881-2018). It uses a newly constructed adjusted series of female labor force participation, disaggregated by region and major sector of activity. The panel dimension of the data is...

The article offers an analysis of the institutional change in the Soviet higher education during the establishment and consolidation period of the USSR. The objective of the analysis focuses on the process development, mainly on the description of the constitutive actions of the Soviet higher...

The paper examines the 1947 monetary stabilization in Italy, tracing the domestic and international political dynamics that allowed ideas and theoretical concepts developed within the Bank of Italy to be applied in a successful action to subdue spiraling inflation. The combination of events and...

An extreme materialist hypothesis explaining the Industrial Revolution would be simply genetic. Gregory Clark asserts such a theory of sociobiological inheritance in his Farewell to Alms (2007). Rich people proliferated in England, Clark argues, and by a social Darwinian struggle the poor and...

This paper explores the macro-economic history of Cyprus in the inter-war period. It constructs the first detailed estimates of output at aggregate and sector levels, enabling the analysis of economic growth and the sectoral structure of the island’s economy. It evaluates its performance...

Dutch noble families have held more elite positions than high bourgeois families during the 20th century, and this relative advantage hardly changed over several generations. In this paper we test on of the possible explanations of this ‘constant noble advantage hypothesis’, using a sample...

Despite the fact that in 2011 Italy will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its political unification, geographical disparities stand out as a prominent characteristic of the country. The paper estimates the trend of the cost-of-living differentials across regions in the half-century after the...

This paper investigates the role performed by mothers in affecting their childrens� performance at school. The article develops �firstly a theoretical modelin which household (parent - child pair) is treated as an individual, whose utility depends both on the performance at school of the...

The different organizational structure of the Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires affected their ability to monitor workers. I test the theoretical implications of these differences using micro data of overseas workers' compensation from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The two...