Was Germany Ever United? Evidence from Intraand International Trade, 1885 -1933* This paper asks whether Germany was ever an economically integrated area. I explore the geography of trade costs in a new data set of about 40,000 observations on regional trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 – 1933. There are three key results. First, the German Empire before 1...

Why did the country that borrowed the most industrialize first? Earlier research has viewed the explosion of debt in 18th century Britain as either detrimental, or as neutral for economic growth. In this paper, we argue instead that Britain’s borrowing boom was beneficial. The massive issuance of liquidly traded bonds allowed the nobility to switch out of low-return investments such as agricult...

A 25-year-old man suffered from recurrent, mass-like, intracerebral lesions and was diagnosed with tumefactive multiple sclerosis (MS). Both interferon β-1b and oral methotrexate (7.5 mg weekly) could not suppress frequent relapses, but he had been in remission for 8 months by the mitoxantrone treatment. At the age of 27, the patient developed a partial seizure. Brain MRI revealed a lesion in t...

In this talk, we propose a new storage method for the results of a static program analysis. Instead of attaching the analysis results to the control-flow graph, we automatically transform the program into a augmented version that uses assert-statements to explicitly check the analyzed properties at runtime. This transformation opens up multiple applications: • Automatic testing of the analysis ...

Central nervous system (CNS) plasticity is essential for development; however, recent research has demonstrated its role in pathology, particularly following overuse and repetition. Previous studies investigating changes in sensorimotor integration (SMI) have used relatively simple paradigms resulting in minimal changes in neural activity, as determined through the use of somatosensory evoked p...

The ~umose of the four ex~eriments re~orted here was to Preliminary results of four experiments designed to determine the competitive effects of Cyperus rotundus L. on sugarcane and to investigate methods of controlling this weed, are reported. A trial in which a plant crop of varieties N13 and N8 was grown under rainfed conditions showed that competition from C. rotundus caused decreases in yi...

We examine spatial convergence in biological well-being in the Habsburg Monarchy circa 1890-1910 on the basis of evidence on the physical stature of 21-year-old recruits disaggregated into 15 districts. We find that the shorter was the population in 1890 the faster its height grew thereafter. Hence, there was convergence in physical stature between the peripheral areas of the monarchy (located ...

The heterogeneity of the available physical capital with respect to productivity and emission intensity is an important factor for policy design, especially in the presence of emission restrictions. In a vintage capital model, reducing pollution requires to change the capital structure through investment in cleaner machines and to scrap the more polluting ones. In such a setting we show that em...

In a field experiment, spreader plants of variety N13 infected with ratoon stunting disease were interplanted with healthy plants of indicator variety NC0376. When cane knives were not disinfected during manual harvesting, 62% ofstalks ofNC0376 down-row from the spreader plants were found to be infected after one harvest, and almost all the stalks were infected after three harvests. This compar...

Why was growth so slow during the British Industrial Revolution? More than a decade ago, Jeff Williamson proposed "crowding-out" as a result of Britain's numerous wars as a key mechanism, but little empirical evidence existed to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided. The eighteenthand early nineteenth-century private loan market balanced through qu...