For the full syllabus for winter semester 2022 and for detailed information on the assignments and how to complete them, go to folder Syllabus located in the course's Learning Activities.
This course argues that economic history is relevant for managers, decision-makers and policy-makers for at least four reasons. First, economic history is important in its own right. As a discipline, it sheds light on important economic and social phenomena that changed the world we live in the most fundamental ways. Second, we often observe that events in the past have long-lasting persistent effects that continue to play a large role today: a solid understanding of the channels behind the phenomenon of historical persistence is crucial to understand our current world. Third, events that happened in the past may harbor important lessons for the design of economic policy and thus the organization/allocation of resources in a firm, a country, a region or even from a global perspective. Fourth, economic history provides an arsenal of events and policies that researchers in business, management and economics can draw upon to test theoretical models and predictions - in other words, economic history can be a laboratory for testing modern theories in the social sciences.