Skip to main content
With great sadness we have learnt that our good friend and colleague David Metcalf has passed away. Together with Richard Layard and Stephen Nickell, David set up the Centre for Labour Economics, which became the Centre ... Read more...
09 February 2026
Even now, 56 years after its release, you don't need to be a transport buff to know about the Beeching report. Following its publication in March 1963, hundreds of stations and thousands of miles of track were axed. The ... Read more...
06 October 2019
Such things occur outside idle thought experiments. Guy Michaels, of the London School of Economics, and Ferdinand Rauch, of the University of Oxford, studied the fortunes of Roman-era towns in Britain and France. When t... Read more...
09 September 2019
More than a century ago, the opening of the Panama Canal revolutionized international trade by making it much quicker and easier to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But, write Stephan Maurer and Ferdinand ... Read more...
22 July 2019
Less efficiency and lower profitability for firms carry lessons for Britain and the US, write Kilian Huber, Volker Lindenthal and Fabian Waldinger. Talented individuals are often excluded from leadership positions if th... Read more...
16 April 2019
One of the first major trade expansions in human history provides early evidence that trade promotes growth, write Jan David Bakker, Stephan Maurer, Jorn-Steffen Pischke and Ferdinand Rauch. ... Read more...
04 April 2019
Johannes Gutenberg died in 1468, a little over a decade after inventing movable type. But he had already set in motion a gold rush-like frenzy of European entrepreneurs who flung open print shops to cash in on his techno... Read more...
28 March 2019
Article by Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch The world is urbanising rapidly (World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision). Some of its rapidly growing cities, however, seem to be misplaced. They are ... Read more...
24 May 2018
Article by Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch The world is urbanising rapidly (World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision). Some of its rapidly growing cities, however, seem to be misplaced.... Read more...
Pawel Bukowski (LSE) about the research presented at the IBS seminar “(Un)equal wages, incomes and wealth in Poland?” (Warsaw, 23/10/2017). ... Read more...
12 April 2018
The telegraph was the Victorian equivalent of today’s ‘big data’, helping firms to forecast future demand, writes Claudia Steinwender. How do exporters gather information about overseas... Read more...
20 March 2018
DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12424 ... Read more...
05 February 2018
Article by Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman. Five hundred years ago today, Martin Luther posted 95 theses on the Wittenberg Castle church door critiquing Catholic Church corruption, setting o... Read more...
31 October 2017
Snippet…Here is the amazing fact: today, 16 of France’s 20 largest cities are located on or near a Roman town, while only 2 of Britain’s 20 largest are. This difference existed even back in ... Read more...
03 September 2017
..With incredible timing, Michaels and Rauch, alongside two other coauthors, have another working paper called Flooded Cities. Essentially, looking across the globe, there are frequent very damaging floods, oc... Read more...
30 August 2017
Economists point to three factors to explain how population is distributed: geographical characteristics, agglomeration, and history. This column, taken from a new Vox eBook, examines ... Read more...
31 January 2017
Professor Saul Estrin of the London School of Economics has shown, for example, that an increase in the level of employee participation in the running of an enterprise from zero to full participation increases output by ... Read more...
02 August 2016
... Tambien lo estudio el historiador Albrecht Ritschl, de la London School of Economices (LSE). En medio de la Guerra Fria, los... Germany suffers from amnesia Also studied it the historian Albrecht Ritschl, of the Lo... Read more...
03 September 2015
Albrecht Ritschl is interviewed on market crashes and China. The interview was broadcast by CNN International Europe - The Business View News on July 9, 2015 [No link available] Related publications 'Reparations, Def... Read more...
09 July 2015
... creditors, in exchange for pro-market reforms'', said Professor Albrecht Ritschl of the London School of Economics. West Germany was able to borrow on international markets again, and, free ... This article was publ... Read more...
See: Comment by georgep76 3dago - below the cartoon Germany has been described as the biggest ''debt transgressor'' of the 20th Century, with restructurings in 1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. Total debt forgiveness for Germ... Read more...
21 June 2015
A look back: national bankruptcies are not so rare The economic historian Albrecht Ritschl called Germany the most wayward of the 20th century: ''The Federal Republic owes your today's financial stability and its status... Read more...
18 June 2015
Q: How do you calculate reparations for something as catastrophic as WWII? A: Were Germany to pay reparations for the whole of the destruction it caused during the war - the Nazis were estimated to have been responsib... Read more...
10 February 2015
Albrecht Ritschl interviewed, discussing Greece's claim that it helped Germany financially after the Second World War and the political motivations behind it. The interview was broadcast on the BBC World Service Globa... Read more...
09 February 2015
According to the new Greek government, Germany has an enormous unpaid account in Greece. The Germans never paid anything for the murdering and plundering in the Second World War. The 'Zwangsanleihe', an extorted loan of ... Read more...
Greek officials are seeking support for a new debt agreement. ... The Germans are conveniently ignoring is their own record as one of history's biggest deadbeats. In the 1920s, according to a prominent German economic hi... Read more...
08 February 2015
''Germany's resurgence has only been possible through waiving extensive debt payments and stopping reparations to its World War II victims'', economic historian Albrecht Ritschl told Der Spiegel in 2011, describing Germa... Read more...
30 January 2015