Household Inequality, Entrepreneurial Dynamism and Corporate Financing Economic theories provide conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepreneurial dynamism and corporate financing. To empirically investigate its impact, we construct local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents, home equity, and 1880 farm land. We identify its effects on...

The Time Varying Risk Puzzle Discount rates are not an important driver of financial volatility. I reach this conclusion using a new historical dataset of returns, cashflows and valuations of all major risky asset classes – equity, housing and corporate bonds – across 17 countries from 1870 to today. Variation...

Entrepreneurial Freedom as a driving Institution during the German Industrial Take-off In this paper, I analyze the effect of the abolition of guilds and the introduction of the “Gewerbefreiheit” – entrepreneurial freedom – on economic development during the German industrial take-off. Using the division of the Kingdom of Westphalia and...

Stabs in the Back – Veterans, Propaganda and the Fate of Weimar Democracy by Christoph Koenig. I study the effect of war participation on the rise of right-wing parties in Interwar Germany. After the democratisation and surrender of the German Empire in 1918, 8m German WW1 soldiers were demobilised. Anecdotally,...

Booms and Busts in Housing Markets: Prices and Turnover in Amsterdam, 1582-1810 Booms and busts in housing markets are typically characterized by four puzzling features: short-term momentum in prices, a positive price-turnover relationship, excess volatility of prices relative to fundamentals, but reversion over the longer run. This paper uses a...

Bite and Divide: Malaria and Ethnolinguistic Diversity by Giorgio Chiovelli. We investigate, both theoretically and empirically, the epidemiological origins of ethnic diversity and its persistence. Long-term exposure to malaria shaped genetic and cultural selection by increasing the benefits of interacting in small, geographically separated and highly endogamic groups. Using disaggregate level...