How serfdom hardwired extractive institutions into the Russian economy Last week on VoxDev, Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 (Università di Torino) & Timur Natkhov (HSE University) discussed serfdom as an extractive institution rooted in frontier defence: voxdev.org/topic/institut…

From a forthcoming paper with Patrick Crawford (on the market this year -- hire him) on rebellions in Canada in 1837-38 and media competition. The map shows the intensity of rebellious activity and newspaper competition. As one can "eyeball regress", rebellions are tied to media

We open our Fall 2025 seminars with Nuno Palma (U. Manchester), presenting Justices of the Peace: Legal Foundations of the Industrial Revolution, which shows how legal capacity through Justices of the Peace underpinned law, regulation, and taxation for long-run growth in England.

We host Christopher Clayton (Yale), presenting “International Currency Competition.” He argues competition makes it harder for countries to build reputation as safe-asset issuers, keeping many stuck low, while the U.S. can use its debt policy to crowd out challengers like China.

My new book: The Great Holocene Transformation: What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies api.omarshehata.me/substack-proxy…

There are two conflicting views on The Thirty Years’ War and the German Industrial Revolution: (1) ‘Modern economic growth’ in the German-speaking lands emerged after the war, very gradually, as Smithian growth took root through territorial consolidation & market integration,

Today in Broadstreet: some PhD students in the market. broadstreet.blog/p/hpe-candidat…

Today Robert P. George (Princeton) presented his newest book: Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. He argues that like markets need trust and shared norms, societies too require the pursuit of objective truths, not just feelings, to sustain freedom and cooperation.

Forthcoming in AER: Insights: "Long Wars" by Sandeep Baliga and Tomas Sjöström. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

#OpenAccess from American Political Science Review - Storm from the Steppes: Warfare and Succession Institutions in Pre-Modern Eurasia, 1000–1799 CE - cup.org/429Rc0C - DANIEL STEVEN SMITH (Ohio State) #FirstView

New in Broadstreet: Blood and Iron: Political Fragmentation in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean. broadstreet.blog/p/blood-and-ir…

Was thrilled to write this for Broadstreet Blog (which I recommend to anyone interested in historical political economy) broadstreet.blog/p/blood-and-ir…

🧵 New survey on theories of government and the state in the annual reviews: annualreviews.org/content/journa… (includes overviews of theories - for teaching) 👇When, where, and why do states form?

BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” with one half to Mokyr

Did you know that economic stagnation, not growth, was the norm throughout most of human history?

Providing systematic evidence on the macroeconomic consequences of war using a new dataset covering 115 conflicts and 145 countries over the past 75 years, from Efraim Benmelech and Joao Monteiro nber.org/papers/w34389

New CEPR Discussion Paper - DP20795 Agricultural Prices and the Onset of Civil War Antonio Ciccone Department of Economics, University of Mannheim ow.ly/GhPU50XjJmU #CEPR_DE #CEPR_ITRE #CEPR_MG #CEPR_PoE #EconTwitter

"Serfdom in early modern Russia wasn’t inevitable—it was driven by landholding soldiers on the southern frontier. To defend against nomads, the state tied peasants to land, cementing coercive labor." New paper by Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 & Timur Natkhov: restud.com/all-along-the-… #econtwitter

Taught 20th-century U.S. economic history this past week. Fitting everything into 90 minutes really makes you appreciate just how much happened in that century.