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...

Structural change and human handedness: how economic development can shape evolutionary forces. This paper proposes a theory linking structural change, differential fertility and the evolution of left-handedness, a genetically determined human trait. By doing so, we are able to rationalize the U-shaped trajectory followed by left-handedness rates over the past...

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...

Fiscal Policy and Conversions in Early Islam A ruler who does not identify with a social group, whether on religious, ethnic, cultural or socioeconomic grounds, is confronted with a trade-off between taking advantage of the outgroup population’s eagerness to maintain its identity and inducing it to “comply” (conversion, quit, exodus...

Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India This paper analyzes the relationship between pre-colonial warfare and long-run development patterns within India. We construct a new, geocoded database of historical conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, which we use to compute measures of local exposure to pre-colonial warfare. We document a positive...

“Don’t get mad, get even” by Pablo Selaya. The existing literature on conflict puts emphasis on the idea that adverse economic shocks are an important determinant of political violence, conflict and civil war – for instance by reducing the costs of engaging in conflict, or undermining the capacity of the...