*Knowledge production is vital to modern progress, but what about the past? Pre-industrial European academic institutions are often assumed to have been flawed, with misallocated talents and resources. In this paper, I examine the role of academies, dynamic and scientifically oriented institutions that emerged between 1650 and 1800. Using new data on historical European academia and advanced difference-in-difference methods, I find that academies contributed to long-term urban growth. Exploiting individual-level data on scholars, I further show that literary academies had no long-term effect, whereas scientific academies led to persistent growth. Finally, I demonstrate that academies had positive spillover effects, both on the growth of neighboring cities and on the quality of pre-existing universities. Altogether, I provide the first empirical evidence of the pivotal role scientific academies played in Europe’s economic growth.

**This paper explores the impact of school segregation laws on educational attainment among White and African American individuals. Following the abolition of slavery, newly freed individuals gained access to education. However, this progress was short-lived as it was ultimately undermined by the Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation in multiple aspects of life. During this period, states enacted legislation either requiring or prohibiting segregation in education. While extensive research has examined the repeal of these laws, their initial implementation has received less attention. To evaluate their effects, I have constructed a comprehensive dataset on educational legislation, with a particular focus on school segregation laws. This dataset is merged with the IPUMS 1940 1% sample, enabling analysis of educational outcomes among cohorts who attended school between 1866 and 1920. The objective of this study is to exploit variation in exposure to school segregation laws across school cohorts and the timing of state-level implementation, to apply a continuous staggered difference-in-differences estimation strategy.