Following the collapse of planning, new small and medium-sized firms rapidly emerged in all transition economies. Using firm level data, we investigate the interaction between the widespread opportunities for new business activities such firms faced and their business environment. The business...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly...

Understanding the factors that may produce a sustained rate of innovation is important for promoting economic development and growth. In this paper, we examine the role of human capital in firms' innovation by using a large sample of manufacturing firms from China. We use two firm-level datasets...

By merging individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth century with county level information on literacy and income tax revenues we show that increases in the stock of human capital not only improved workers' productivity but also accelerated innovative...