This paper analyzes long-term effects of skilled-worker immigration on productivity for the Huguenot migration to Prussia. In 1685, religiously persecuted French Huguenots settled in Brandenburg-Prussia and compensated for population losses due to plagues during the Thirty Years’ War. We combine Huguenot immigration lists from 1700 with Prussian firm-level data on the value of inputs and outputs in 1802 in a unique database to analyze the effects of skilled immigration to places with underused economic potential. Exploiting this settlement pattern in an instrumental-variable approach, we find substantial long-term effects of Huguenot settlement on the productivity of textile manufactories.

We show that the creation of the first integrated multi-modal pan-European transport network during Roman times influences economic integration over two millennia. Drawing on spatially highly disaggregated data on excavated Roman ceramics, we document that contemporary interregional trade was influenced by connectivity within the network. Today, these connectivity differentials continue to influence integration as approximated by cross-regional firm investment behaviour. Continuity is partly explained by selective infrastructure routing and cultural integration due to bilateral convergence in preferences and values. We show that our results are Roman-connectivity specific and do not reflect pre-existing patterns of exchange using pre-Roman trade data.

This study argues that the decline of coercive labour institutions over the course of industrialization was partly driven by complementarity between physical capital and effective labour in manufacturing. Given the difficulty of extracting labour effort in care-intensive industrial tasks through monitoring and punishment, capital-owning elites ultimately chose to emancipate workers to induce their supply of effective labour and, thus, boost the return to physical capital. This hypothesis is empirically examined in the context of serf emancipation in nineteenth-century Prussia. Exploiting variation in proto-industrialization across Prussian counties, the analysis finds that, consistent with the proposed hypothesis, the initial abundance of elite-owned physical capital is associated with a higher pace of serf emancipation and lower redemption payments to manorial lords.