Employment Pacts in Italy 1992 to 2002

Beschäftigungspolitik, Sozialpakt, Zeitgeschichte, Italien, Employment policy, Social pact, Contemporary history, Italy

Does Parental Education Affect Fertility? Evidence from Pre-Demographic Transition Prussia

While  women’s  employment  opportunities,  relative  wages,  and  the child quantity quality trade-off have been studied as factors underlying historical fertility limitation, the role of parental education has received little  attention.  We  combine  Prussian  county  data  from  three censuses—1816,  1849,  and  1867—to  estimate  the  relationship between women’s education and their fertility before the demographic transition.  Despite  controlling  for  several  demand  and  supply  factors, we  find  a  negative  residual  effect  of  women’s  education  on  fertility. Instrumental variable estimates, using exogenous variation in women's education driven by differences in landownership inequality, suggest that the effect of women's education on fertility is casual.Demographic transition; female education; fertitility; Nineteenth Century Prussia

Prussia disaggregated : the demography of its universe of localities in 1871

We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live predominantly in towns. Villages and manors are substantially segregated by denomination, whereas towns are less segregated. Yet, we find relatively lower levels of segregation by literacy. Regression analyses with county-fixed effects show that a larger share of Protestants is associated with higher literacy rates across all location types. A larger share of Jews relative to Catholics is not significantly associated with higher literacy in towns, but it is in villages and manors. Finally, a larger share of Jews is associated with lower fertility in towns, which is not explained by differences in literacy

The political economy of the Prussian three-class franchise

How did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policies? Contrary to the predominant and simplistic view that the system allowed the landed elites to capture most political rents, we find that members of parliament from constituencies with a higher vote inequality support more liberal policies, gauging their political orientation from the universe of roll call votes cast in parliament during Prussia’s rapid industrialization (1867–1903). Consistent with the characteristics of German liberalism that aligned with economic interests of business, the link between vote inequality and liberal voting is stronger in regions with large-scale industry

Do Entrepreneurs Matter?

Publisher PD

International risk sharing in the short run and in the long run

Using a panel of 23 industrialised countries, the paper investigates how short-run and long-run income risks are shared and how the source of uncertainty matters for the way this risk gets insured. Surprisingly, short-term and long-term output risks are found to be equally well insured. Transitory shocks get smoothed almost completely whereas permanent shocks remain 80 percent uninsured. We find a somewhat more important role for international capital markets than earlier studies. Whereas our results tie in with some recent theoretical insights and are consistent with empirical findings on home bias in international portfolios, they raise the question why permanent shocks are so hard to insure internationally. Keywords; international consumption risk sharing, European integration, panel data, panel vector autoregressions

Does parental education affect fertility? Evidence from pre-demographic transition Prussia

While  women’s  employment  opportunities,  relative  wages,  and  the child quantity‐quality trade‐off have been studied as factors underlying  historical fertility limitation, the role of parental education  has received little attention.  We  combine  Prussian  county  data  from  three censuses—1816,  1849,  and  1867—to  estimate  the relationship between women’s education and their  fertility before the demographic transition.  Despite  controlling  for  several  demand  and  supply  factors,  we  find  a  negative  residual  effect  of  women’s  education  on  fertility.  Instrumental‐variable estimates, using exogenous variation in women's  education  driven  by  differences in  landownership  inequality,  suggest  that the effect of women’s education on fertility is causal. 

The Effect of Protestantism on Education before the Industrialization: Evidence from 1816 Prussia

This paper uses recently discovered data on nearly 300 Prussian counties in 1816 to show that Protestantism led to more schools and higher school enrolment already before the industrialization. This evidence supports the human capital theory of Protestant economic history of Becker and Woessmann (2009), where Protestantism first led to better education, which in turn facilitated industrial development. It rules out that the existing end-of-19th-century evidence can be explained by a Weberian explanation, where a Protestant work ethic first led to industrialization which then increased the demand for education.education, Protestantism, pre-industrialization