The allocation of talent: finance versus entrepreneurship The rapid growth of the US financial sector has driven policy debate on whether it is socially desirable. I propose a heterogeneous agent model with asymmetric information and matching frictions that produces a tradeoff between finance and entrepreneurship. By becoming bankers, talented individuals...

The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade and Economic Development The 1870-1913 period marked the birth of the first era of trade globalization. How did this tremendous increase in trade affect economic development? This work isolates a causality channel by exploiting the fact that the steamship produced an asymmetric change...

A flow-of-funds perspective on the financial crisis – the role of sectoral leverage and balance sheets with Celestino Giron. We provide a narrative of the financial crisis following a flow-of-funds perspective focusing on the rotation of savings-investment imbalances and leverage across economic sectors. The role of excessive leverage (in terms...

Gender equality during the French Development Process The enlightenment of the long-run relationship between gender equality and economic growth is hampered by the lack of information and resources on the various dimensions of gender equality. This paper is a first attempt to assess the size of the gender gap in...

The Role of Human Capital and Innovation in Economic Development: Evidence from Post-Malthusian Prussia The effect of human capital on growth may involve multiple channels. On one side, it can have an indirect effect by facilitating the adoption or creation of new technologies and by influencing fertility patterns. On the...

Religion, Division of Labor and Conflict: Anti-Semitsm in German Regions over 600 Years with Luigi Pascali. Abstract Anti-Semitism continues to be a widespread societal problem rooted deeply in history. Using novel city-level data from Germany for more than 2,000 cities and county-level data, we study the role of economic incentives...

Credit Rationing and Social Stability: Evidence from 1930s China with Alberto Manconi and Haikun Zhu Can credit affect social stability? To answer this question, we turn to a natural experiment from 1930s China, where credit contracted as a consequence of the 1933 U.S. Silver Purchase program. Building on extensive archival...