Can social institutions foster knowledge production by lowering the cost of learning from others? We study this question in seventeenth-century London, where coffeehouses served as public venues for exchanging ideas across social and occupational groups. Historians have long argued that coffeehouses fostered rational debate and helped Enlightenment ideas flourish. We test this claim for science. Using geocoded records and a staggered event study across London parishes, we find that the arrival of the first coffeehouse in a parish substantially and persistently increases the number of mathematical practitioners and scientific instrument shops. We argue that coffeehouses fostered this growth by making scientific knowledge easier to access and experimental science more interactive and public. Consistent with this mechanism, effects are larger among practitioners with weaker ties to Oxford and Cambridge, connections between theory-oriented scientists and practical instrument makers increase, and shops producing experimental instruments become more common.

How does opening a profession to a previously excluded group shape the next generation? We study women’s entry into elementary-school teaching in Sweden after the 1859 reform that first allowed them to hold certified positions. Teaching rapidly feminized, and teachers became overrepresented among the female political elite. We link newly digitized teacher registers and school-district maps to full-count censuses and roughly 350,000 handwritten signatures from the 1913–14 women’s suffrage petition. Exploiting the staggered arrival of female teachers across school districts, we find that potentially exposed girls were more likely to participate politically and work in non-domestic occupations as adults. Exposed women were 23 percent more likely to sign the petition and, in 1910, 9 percent more likely to hold a non-domestic occupation. Spatial estimates using access to female teacher seminaries provide evidence linking female teachers to stronger local suffrage support.

Can wealth confiscation weaken elite persistence? This paper studies Sweden’s Great Reduction of 1680, the largest wealth redistribution in Swedish history, in which the Crown confiscated roughly half of noble estates. We link noble genealogies to landholdings from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries across Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia. Using variation in exposure to confiscation, conditional on observables, we estimate the immediate and intergenerational effects of the Reduction on economic and social outcomes. The shock persistently reduced landed wealth: affected families owned substantially fewer manors than otherwise similar noble families across generations. Yet these losses did not meaningfully alter demographics, military careers, marriage patterns, or human capital. The results show that elite persistence did not rest on wealth alone: confiscation reduced landed wealth for generations, but left other markers of elite status largely unchanged.