Can social spaces raise knowledge production by lowering the cost of learning from others? Historians have long credited coffeehouses, commercial venues where strangers met across social ranks, with fostering rational debate and seeding Enlightenment culture. We test this claim for science in seventeenth-century London. Using geocoded records and a staggered event study across parishes, we find a substantial and lasting increase in the number of mathematical practitioners and scientific instrument shops following a parish's first coffeehouse. Effects are concentrated among practitioners with weak ties to Oxford and Cambridge, connections between theory-oriented scientists and instrument makers multiply, and new shops turn toward experimental instruments. We argue coffeehouses fostered this growth by cheapening access to scientific knowledge for those outside academic networks and by making experimental science interactive and public.

How does opening a profession to a previously excluded group shape the next generation? From 1859, Sweden allowed women to hold teaching posts in elementary schools. We digitize teacher registers, district maps, and 350,000 signatures from the 1913–14 suffrage petition, linked to full-count censuses. Event studies exploiting the staggered timing of districts’ first female hire show that women exposed as schoolgirls were 23 percent more likely to sign the petition and, in 1910, 9 percent more likely to work outside the home. Using the presence of women’s teacher seminaries nearby as an instrument, we find more suffrage associations and higher female turnout.

This paper studies how far a wealth shock persists across generations and erodes status by examining the largest confiscation in Swedish history: the Great Reduction of 1680, which took half the nobility’s landed wealth. Linking noble genealogies to manor ownership across the Swedish realm, we compare descendants of nobles who lost manors with those of observably similar nobles who did not. Manor ownership falls sharply and stays lower four generations later, by more than mobility correlations predict. Yet careers, marriages, human capital, and demographic outcomes barely move, though they respond strongly to membership in the political elite.