This paper develops an analytic narrative examining an institution known as "The Exchequer of the Jewry". The prohibition on usury resulted in most moneylending activities being concentrated within the Jewish community. The king set up the Exchequer of the Jewry in order to extract these...

We study a setting in which the education system privileges some identities and marginalizes others. When the ideal identity prescribed by the education system evolves with the composition of the educated subpopulation, persistent educational inequality can emerge even when communities are ex...

What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. Using panel data consisting of 1,366 city-level persecutions of Jews from 936...

The political economy of medieval Europe was shaped by alliances between lords and vassals, forged through peaceful and violent means. We model coalition formation through bargaining or by conquest, and where members can rebel against their coalition. We derive conditions under which a realm...

We provide a new framework to account for the diverging paths of political development and state building in China and Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century. The arrival of Western powers not only brought opportunities to adopt new technologies, but also fundamentally threatened...

This paper explores the institutional determinants of persecution by studying the intensity of the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire. Political fragmentation exacerbated rent-seeking in the Holy Roman Empire. We argue that this fragmentation led to Jewish communities facing more...

Educational institutions not only build human capital; they also shape culture. We present a model of cultural dynamics produced by cultural transmission through the education system. Groups that are culturally marginalized are also economically disadvantaged and exhibit various forms of...

The trade route between Manila and Mexico was a monopoly of the Spanish Crown for more than 250 years. The ships that sailed this route — the Manila Galleons, were “the richest ships in all the oceans”, but much of the wealth sank at sea and remains undiscovered. We introduce a newly...