Funding Organisation: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Timeline: January 2026 – December 2029
Budget: 596'058 CHF

Summary:

Description: The project investigates how trade shapes long-run growth through two dynamic channels not captured by standard trade models. Subproject A studies technology diffusion through trade networks from antiquity to the medieval period, using ML-extracted museum artifact data to measure material culture and coin hoard data to estimate trade flows, embedded in a quantitative spatial model of trade and endogenous growth. Subproject B studies how Arab–Eastern European silver trade contributed to the formation of the first Polish state (c. 960 AD), using digitized medieval coin hoards to estimate trade barriers and market access, combined with a structural model of trade and endogenous state boundaries. Main output will be two research papers and a conference.

Timeline: Four years, structured as follows. 

• Year 1–Year 2 (first half): data collection and assembly — museum collection sourcing/cleaning, coin hoard digitization, geocoding, and estimation of trade shares.
• Year 2 (second half): descriptive analysis and reduced-form econometrics — validation of technology measures, correlations with trade shares and geography.
• Years 3–4 (first half): model development, structural estimation, and counterfactual analysis for both subprojects. Year 4 (second half): writing, dissemination, workshops, conference submissions, and dataset publication.

Team: 

• Principal Investigator, Johannes Boehm, Professor, International Economics, Geneva Graduate Institute
• Project partner, Thomas Chaney, University of Southern California Department of Economics, United States of America
• Project Partner, Danial Lashkari, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
   

Key Words: Keywords: Economic Geography, Economic Growth, Economic History, Growth, Market Integration, State Formation, Technology Diffusion, Technology diffusion, Trade