"The remarkable economic performance of the Roman Empire is now widely acknowledged. Yet there is still much debate about its interpretation. Although this debate is mainly conducted at the empire-wide level, regional syntheses are indispensable to its further advancement. This book contributes...

23 Stock Exchanges were in operation in Germany in 1913. We provide new data about the number of listed firms, their market value, and the number of IPOs between 1897 and 1913 for all exchanges. We assess reasons why a firm opts to be listed at a certain exchange. Large firms tend to be listed...

This paper suggests that inequality in landownership is a non-financial hurdle for human capital accumulation. It is the first to present evidence that inequality in landownership had an adverse effect on the level of public education in the Korean colonial period. Using a fixed effects model,...

Do new school types focusing on practical and business-related knowledge lead to increased economic performance? To analyze this question, this paper examines the introduction of two types of modern secondary education, the Gewerbeschule and its successor, the Realschule, in nineteenth-century...

The height of the French male population of the Ancien Régime is estimated, on the basis of military records, to have been about 162 cm in the 17th century. This extremely short stature implies that "the crisis of the 17th century" had an immense impact on the human organism itself. The...

This paper investigates the interplay between cultural traditions and policy effectiveness. It explores the differential impact of a large development program (Cassa per il Mezzogiorno), implemented for four decades, starting in the 1950s, to stimulate convergence between Italy's South and the...