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Associate
Expertise: technology diffusion, economic growth, political economy, economic history.
Dr Jeremiah Dittmar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics. His research centres on technology diffusion, economic growth, political economy, and economic history.
We examine the role of universities in knowledge production and industrial change using historical evidence. Political shocks led to a profound pro-science shift in German universities around 1800. To study the consequen... Read more...
Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralph R. Meisenzahl
30 June 2022
We document how the Black Death activated politics and led to economic divergence within Europe. Before the pandemic, economic development was similar in Eastern and Western German cities despite greater political fragme... Read more...
Luis Bosshart and Jeremiah Dittmar
22 October 2021
What can we learn about the potential effects of Covid-19 by looking at plagues of the past? According to Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralf Meisenzahl, history suggests that experiences of severe suffering can lead populations t... Read more...
02 November 2020
What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study public goods provision established through new laws in German cities during the 1500s. Cities that adopted the laws subsequently ... Read more...
01 March 2020
Jeremiah Dittmar explores the effects of the printing press and the new forms of competition that accompanied its introduction.... Read more...
Jeremiah Dittmar
01 March 2019
We study the role of book content in economic, religious, and institutional development after the introduction of printing, and the role of competition in determining the amount and content of local printing. We focus on... Read more...
Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold
31 January 2019
Using novel microdata, we document an important, unintended consequence ofthe Protestant Reformation: a reallocation ofresources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual fra... Read more...
Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman
01 November 2018
The Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, was both a shock to the market for religion and a first-order economic shock. We study its impact on the allocation of resources between the religious and secular sectors in... Read more...
17 May 2017
What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study legal reforms that established mass public education and increased state capacity in German cities during the 1500s. These fundam... Read more...
17 March 2016
This research studies how variations in competition and in media content characterized the use and impact of Gutenberg's printing press technology during the European Renaissance. The research constructs annual firm-leve... Read more...
01 August 2015
This research studies the role of competition in the diffusion of radical ideas and institutional change during the Protestant Reformation. We construct a new measure of religious content in the media using data on all k... Read more...