The 13th EHES Conference took place in Paris at the end of last month. With the conference comes two prizes for research conducted during the two years since the previous conference.
The first is the Gino Luzzatto Prize, awarded to the best dissertation defended in the previous two years on any topic in economic history. This year’s prize went to Thilo Albers for his dissertation Trade Frictions, Trade Policies, and the Interwar Business Cycle. Thilo completed his PhD at the LSE and is now a postdoc at the Institute of Economic History at Humboldt University in Berlin. Stay tuned for a summary of his dissertation which will be published in the Review together with the two other finalists, Pamfili Antipa and Michiel De Haas. You can read more about his research on his website here.
The other prize is the Figurola Prize, sponsored by the Figuerola Institute of Social Science History, which is awarded to the best paper published in the Review during the previous two years. This year the honor goes to Fabian Wahl, for the paper “Political participation and economic development. Evidence from the rise of participative political institutions in the late medieval German Lands”, published in the May 2019 issue of the Review.
The abstract: Participative political institutions in late medieval cities in the German Lands had the potential to impact city size and growth. The study confirms the positive effect on economic outcomes of participative political institutions in 282 cities, but supports a more skeptical view of craft guilds. Craft guilds participating in the city council had zero or negative impact. Enfranchising citizens to elect the city government had a stable and robustly positive effect on city size and growth, but only during the medieval period. The effect of participatory institutions declines with age; they are prone to institutional degeneration and rent-seeking.
The full paper can be read here, and more about his research can be found on his website here.
Congratulations to both of you; we are looking forward to more research in the coming years!