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This paper analyzes incomes and income inequality in Stockholm from 1870 to 1970. The paper builds on a new dataset of 38,022 randomly sampled Stockholm residents 1870–1950, with information on income, occupation, age, gender, and household composition. This is complemented by the Census of 1930 and a Statistics Sweden sample for 1960 and 1970. Incomes were very unequally distributed between 1870 and 1920, with Gini coefficients of pre-tax income around sixty. After 1920 inequality fell quite steadily. A drop in capital incomes contributed, and when looking at post-tax incomes the growth of progressive taxation after 1930 also contributed, but most of the high inequality up to 1920 and equalization after this date depended on the distribution of labour income. In the early 1900s professional groups had huge income advantages over workers, but this advantage was drastically reduced after 1920 when working-class incomes grew rapidly. An important mechanism of income growth was the upgrading of the jobs structure, highlighting the importance of structural change, beyond the Kuznetsian binary of agriculture–manufacturing, for understanding long-run economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses fifty-three social tables, ranging from Greece in 330 BCE to Mexico in 1940 to estimate the share and level of income of the top 1 % in pre-industrial societies. The share of the top 1 % covers a vast range from around 10 % to more than 40 % of society's income and does not always move together with the estimated Gini coefficient and the Inequality Extraction Ratio. I provide a taxonomy of pre-industrial societies based on the social class and type of assets (land, control of government, merchant capital, citizenship) that are associated with the top classes as well as lack of assets associated with poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines judicial and legislative modifications to a specific property rule, the benefit offset, which was widely employed by railroad companies during the 19th century as a way to reduce required compensation for land taken through eminent domain. At the beginning of the railroad boom, all states allowed the benefit offset; by the end of the boom, most states had banned it, some via court decisions, others via legislation. Consistent with a simple model in which a court and a legislature act as (imperfect) agents of the public: 1) challenges to the benefit offset generally began with litigation; 2) all states that litigated the offset eventually restricted it, but not always through litigation; 3) where courts chose to allow the offset, legislation restricted it, often with substantial lags; 4) those lags tended to be longer (i.e., more time passed between litigation and subsequent legislation) when the litigation efforts took place early in the track building process (at which time the offset was more likely to be socially valuable); 5) states that never banned the benefit offset were those where landowners were unlikely to have ever been harmed by the practice (principally western states with vast expanses of public and private land). The model and historical evidence illustrate how a system that grants both the court and the legislature the power to alter property rules can establish a beneficial redundancy that increases the value of modifiable property rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use the expansion of the US railroad network from 1900 to 1910 and the resulting spatial variation in increased market access to investigate whether economic shocks that occur during childhood have long-run ramifications on later-life outcomes, and the channels through which such effects manifest. I link individuals across the 1900, 1910, and 1940 full-count US Censuses and incorporate an instrumental variable strategy to help isolate the causal effect of market access. I find that, in the short run, sons are less likely to be literate and have more siblings. In the long-run, these sons then become less likely to be well-educated and earn lower incomes. The results of this paper shed light on the mechanisms through which railroad-induced market access and other economic shocks during childhood can impact individuals even in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents evidence that firms had labor market power during the early 1930s. Using plant-level data from the Census of Manufactures between 1929 and 1935, I construct a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of local labor market concentration at the State-Economic-Area-by-industry-by-occupation level. I find that local labor market concentration has a negative relationship with wages which is consistent with labor market monopsony power. The results are robust to excluding local labor markets with one firm, excluding industries with local product markets, as well as the inclusion of industry characteristic, SEA, and occupational time trends. I find evidence that New Deal minimum wage policies weakened monopsony power. I also find suggestive evidence that high unemployment rates during 1930 reduced workers' bargaining power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes migrant self-selection from Portugal between 1885 and 1930 for both men and women. Leveraging newly digitized data on migrants' characteristics across districts and literacy as a selection indicator, we document that self-selection was positive over the entire period but varied markedly across space and time. In some districts, migrants' literacy was similar to the general population, while in others over three times as large. In line with models of household migration, selection was significantly lower among migrant women, who were more likely to be tied movers. Our econometric analyses show a large negative relationship between migrant flows and self-selection, notably among men. We also find that the vintage of networks mattered differently by gender: male self-selection was more responsive to recent flows, while female self-selection was mostly influenced by past flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of public transport networks in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had profound effects on commuting in the industrialized world, yet the consequences for labor markets during this important period of historical development remains largely unstudied. This paper draws on a unique dataset combining individual commuting and wage information for working-class residents of London, circa 1930, to analyze, for the first time, the nature of and returns to commuting shortly after when networks were first built. A sizeable majority of working-class Londoners worked within a short walk of their residence in 1890. By 1930, over 70 percent commuted at least one kilometer. Commuting allowed workers to search for jobs over a wider geographic area and across a larger number of potential employers. This, in turn, potentially increased workers' bargaining power and improved employer-employee matching. We show that wage returns to commuting were on the order of 1.5–3.5 percent per kilometer travelled. Access to public transport increased both the probability of commuting and distance commuted but had little or no direct effect on the probability of being employed or on earnings. We argue that these results are consistent with a search and matching framework; commuting led to workers finding jobs more suited to their skills and to better matches with employers. We also provide descriptive evidence from contemporary sources to describe the impact of commuting on improving quality of life by reducing urban crowding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impact that Spanish road construction had on local population growth between 1787 and 1857. We find that the increase in market potential associated to road accessibility had a significant effect on local population growth. The impact was substantially higher on the municipalities that had a more diversified occupational structure. By contrast, the effect of the new network on population growth was negative in municipalities close but without direct access to the roads. We interpret these findings as evidence of a process of rural-to-rural migration due to the new roads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the policies that the Castile of the seventeenth century followed toward creating and selling short-term and long-term debt paid off from the Crown's New World revenues. We use microdata to reconstruct comprehensive fiscal accounts for Spanish America during the seventeenth century. Our new time series evidence shows that the Spanish Empire maintained differential debt policies in the center and the periphery. Spanish America issued considerably less debt, more credible than coetaneous Castilian debt. However, the issuances' size did not reflect lower debt capacity in the New World, as the Spanish Empire restrained long-term debt issuance to emergencies. We also provide complementary evidence from debt issuances and explain why differential debt policies were maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have used historical heights as markers of health, living standards, and long-run development. Although possible selection bias has been debated, height measurement error is less studied. I analyze novel administrative data of male Indian indentured laborers with repeated measurements of adult height to answer an important underlying question of precision. Laborers were measured by British colonial officials on departure in India and again several years later when opting to return to India. I find no height differences for men who had attained full height in India. Younger men continued to grow even into their twenties. A caste subgroup analysis finds mostly similar results. This paper provides some of the first evidence showing height consistency in repeated measurements of adult heights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research has been conducted on the concept of jobless recoveries and their potential causes, primarily focused on the United States from the 1990s. This paper finds that the prolonged employment downturn following the brief 1980–1981 recession in Britain qualifies as a jobless recovery and then investigates possible contributing factors: labor reallocation across industries, regional employment changes, and job polarization. The United States, which did not have a jobless recovery from the early 1980s recession, is taken as a comparison case. I find that the leading candidate explanation for this jobless recovery is the reallocation of labor across industries. This suggests an important role for structural change in the early 1980s recession and in jobless recoveries more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the politics of eminent domain, using a specific historical episode: the enactment of the new California constitution in 1879. It presents evidence that the failure of a constitutional provision that would have codified eminent domain powers for water development resulted from a complex interchange of economic interests among farmers, miners, and urban residents. This evidence was manifested in delegate behavior on the floor of the constitutional convention in 1878, including various roll-call votes, which are subjected to an econometric analysis. The results have implications for the interpretation of legislative eminent domain decisions, and the degree to which economic development processes are shaped by the institutional environment in which they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel pre-processing technique to improve record linkage for historical Chinese populations. Current matching approaches are relatively ineffective due to Chinese-specific naming conventions and enumeration errors. This paper develops a three-step process that both triples the match rate over baseline and improves match accuracy. The procedures developed in this paper can be applied in part or in full to other sources of historical data, and/or modified for use with other character-based languages such as Japanese. More broadly, this approach suggests the promise of language-specific linkage procedures to boost match rates for ethnic minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how to successfully digitize large-scale historical micro-data by augmenting optical character recognition (OCR) engines with pre- and post-processing methods. Although OCR software has improved dramatically in recent years due to improvements in machine learning, off-the-shelf OCR applications still present high error rates which limit their applications for accurate extraction of structured information. Complementing OCR with additional methods can however dramatically increase its success rate, making it a powerful and cost-efficient tool for economic historians. This paper showcases these methods and explains why they are useful. We apply them against two large balance sheet datasets and introduce quipucamayoc, a Python package containing these methods in a unified framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-distributive policies are often used by governments to forestall conflict. This paper analyzes the evolution of rural conflict in a region of 1930s Spain in which fast transfers of land using temporal expropriations were aimed at reducing poverty and mitigate conflict. Using a subset of exogenous land transfers, we document that these transfers did not reduce conflict. If anything, they increased some types of conflicts for several months after implementation. The short run increase in conflict is consistent with two potential side effects of land reforms. First, land reforms can boost the collective action of beneficiaries. Second, poorly designed reforms can reduce the incomes of beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the long-run settlement and economic activities in the highlands of Asia. The highland terrains uniquely determined seasonal migration paths by nomadic pastoralists (so called "nomadic corridors"), along which trade routes and settlements formed. Using simulated nomadic corridors as a proxy for ancient transportation networks, we study how closely contemporary economic activities remain around these routes. We find that in the highlands, the ancient routes are associated with positive economic outcomes in the long run; trade hubs along the routes continued to draw people and are more populated today relative to other areas in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender discrimination has been pointed out as a determining factor behind the long-run divergence in incomes of Southern vis-à-vis Northwestern Europe. In this paper, we show that women in Portugal were not historically more discriminated against than those in other parts of Western Europe, including England and the Netherlands. We rely on a new dataset of thousands of observations from archival sources covering six centuries, and we complement it with a qualitative discussion of comparative social norms. Compared with Northwestern Europe, women in Portugal faced similar gender wage gaps, married at similar ages, and did not face more restrictions on labor market participation. Consequently, other factors must have been responsible for the Little Divergence of Western European incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a structural time series model to explore U.S. commodity market convergence, efficiency, and intertemporal smoothing from 1750–1949. I find near-continuous convergence that is largely concentrated in the frontier, broad antebellum efficiency gains, and intertemporal smoothing from the 1880s onward among the most perishable goods. The results reveal new periods of integration across all three metrics and underscore the rapid rate of integration on the frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nation-building is often proposed as a device for integration in ethnically divided societies. The determinants of national sentiment, however, remain imperfectly understood. This paper analyses the role of interethnic contact in the process of nation formation within multiethnic Yugoslavia, just before its disintegration in 1991. Using a variety of data sources and empirical strategies, I find that interethnic contact stimulated the formation of the Yugoslav nation. I argue that ethnic intermarriage is the key mechanism through which ethnic diversity influenced the adoption of a shared Yugoslav identity. These results illustrate the powerful effect that interethnic contact can have in reducing ethnic division even in a tense ethnic environment on the verge of conflict, like that of Yugoslavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a reassessment of the free-banking history of Switzerland, which included both a period of unfettered competition (1826–1881) and one of strong banknote regulation (1881–1907). Unfettered competition between note-issuing banks gave rise to a fragmented paper-money system, with limited liquidity banknotes. To increase confidence in these notes, the federal government introduced a minimum-reserve requirement and a mutual-conversion rule in 1881. Based on a theoretical model and new empirical evidence, this paper shows that this enhanced regulation came at a cost, as it led to the overissuing of banknotes and an inelastic paper-money supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demographic and epidemiological transitions of the past 200 years are well documented at an aggregate level. Understanding differences in individual and group risks for mortality during these transitions requires linkage between demographic data and detailed individual cause of death information. This paper describes the digitization of almost 185,000 causes of death for Ohio to supplement demographic information in the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database (LIFE-M). To extract causes of death, our methodology combines handwriting recognition, extensive data cleaning algorithms, and the semi-automated classification of causes of death into International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. Our procedures are adaptable to other collections of handwritten data, which require both handwriting recognition and semi-automated coding of the information extracted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods for linking individuals across historical data sets, typically in combination with AI based transcription models, are developing rapidly. Perhaps the single most important identifier for linking is personal names. However, personal names are prone to enumeration and transcription errors and although modern linking methods are designed to handle such challenges, these sources of errors are critical and should be minimized. For this purpose, improved transcription methods and large-scale databases are crucial components. This paper describes and provides documentation for HANA, a newly constructed large-scale database which consists of more than 3.3 million names. The database contains more than 105 thousand unique names with a total of more than 1.1 million images of personal names, which proves useful for transfer learning to other settings. We provide three examples hereof, obtaining significantly improved transcription accuracy on both Danish and US census data. In addition, we present benchmark results for deep learning models automatically transcribing the personal names from the scanned documents. Through making more challenging large-scale databases publicly available we hope to foster more sophisticated, accurate, and robust models for handwritten text recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When did overseas trade start to matter for living standards? Traditional real-wage indices suggest that living standards in Europe stagnated before 1800. In this paper, we argue that welfare may have actually risen substantially, but surreptitiously, because of an influx of new goods. Colonial "luxuries" such as tea, coffee, and sugar became highly coveted. Together with more simple household staples such as potatoes and tomatoes, overseas goods transformed European diets after the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. They became household items in many countries by the end of the 18th century. We apply two standard methods to calculate broad orders of magnitude of the resulting welfare gains. While they cannot be assessed precisely, gains from greater variety may well have been big enough to boost European real incomes by 10% or more (depending on the assumptions used). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on Europe's modern economic growth using the statistical concept of long-range dependence. Different regimes, defined as periods between two successive endogenously estimated structural shocks, matched episodes of pandemics and war. The most persistent shocks occurred at the time of the Black Death and the twentieth century's world wars. Our findings confirm that the Black Death often resulted in higher income levels but reject the view of a uniform long-term response to the Plague. In fact, we find a negative impact on incomes in non-Malthusian economies. In the North Sea Area (Britain and the Netherlands), the Plague was followed by positive trend growth in output per capita and population, heralding the onset of modern economic growth and the Great Divergence in Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dramatic decrease in international trade costs in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a global trade boom. In this paper, we examine the consequences of greater openness to international trade for regional economic activity in a small, open economy during the first era of globalization. Specifically, we provide a quantitative assessment of the role that exposure to globalization played in industrialization in Canada between 1871 and 1891. Greater exposure to globalization leads to faster growth of manufacturing and the greater concentration of industry around entrepôts of trade between Canada and the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? At first glance, with its rising levels of population and per capita income, it seems Russia was in a transition away from Malthusian equilibrium. However, the joint increase in population and per capita income could also have been the result of Russia's high land-to-labor ratio. Which of the two is it? Such a problem is a frequent one in economic history, as many frontier economies have high land-to-labor ratios, which foil the researcher's ability to determine whether an economy was transitioning or whether it was growing because of weak land constraints. In this paper, we use quarterly demographic and economic data from Moscow (which we take as a proxy for Russia) in conjunction with a Cointegrated Vector Autoregression approach to determine whether the Russian economy was transitioning away from a Malthusian equilibrium. We find signs of Malthusian pressures still operating while wages had stopped responding to changes in death and birth rates. This combination suggests that a vulnerable transition was truly underway even though a Malthusian shadow remained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a history of aggregate demand and supply shocks spanning 1900 – 2016 for the United Kingdom. Sign restrictions derived from a workhorse Keynesian model are used to identify the signs of those shocks. We compare the 30 largest shocks implied by a vector autoregressive model in unemployment and inflation with the narrative historical record. Our approach provides a new perspective on well-known events in economic history. We highlight two episodes of particular interest: an aggregate supply shock in the late 1920s, which we attribute to changes in the bargaining power of labor, and positive aggregate demand shocks in the mid-1970s, which we attribute to fiscal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the determinants of providing financial support to revolutionaries, using a hand-compiled dataset of 17,000 donations to the Irish National Aid Association after the Easter Rising of 1916. Financial support is best predicted by literacy, marital status, religious affiliation, and relatively high socio-economic status. In this sense, donations to revolutionaries share some characteristics of a luxury good. I find evidence that long-run historical grievances (the Great Famine) also predict support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been absent from recent debates about comparative long-run growth owing to the lack of data on aggregate economic performance before 1950. This paper provides estimates of GDP per capita on an annual basis for eight Anglophone African economies for the period since 1885, raising new questions about previous characterizations of the region's economic performance. The new data show that many of these economies had levels of per capita income which were above subsistence by the early twentieth century, on a par with the largest economies in Asia until the 1980s. However, overall improvements in GDP per capita were limited by episodes of negative growth or "shrinking", the scale and scope of which can be measured through annual data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests if a strong labor movement leads to fewer industrial conflicts. The focus is on Sweden between the first general election in 1919 and the famous Saltsjöbaden Agreement in 1938, a formative period when the country transitioned from fierce labor conflicts to a state of industrial peace. We use panel data techniques to analyze more than 2000 strikes in 103 Swedish towns. We find that a shift of political majority towards the Social Democrats led to a significant decline in strikes, but only in towns where union presence was strong. The strike-reducing mechanism is related to corporatist explanations rather than increased social spending in municipal budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• RCA and ECI reconstructed for tens of countries and colonies in the 19th century. • Based on the catalogues of five universal exhibitions: 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900. • First application of the Economic Complexity Index to the pre-Second World War era. • ECI is related to the level and long-run growth of GDP per capita. The complexity of a country's product mix is related to its economic growth. This paper extends this key insight from the economic growth literature to the second half of the 19th century, by reconstructing Revealed Comparative Advantages (RCA) and Economic Complexity Indices (ECI) for tens of polities, including both independent countries and colonies. It does so by exploiting product-polity information from the catalogues of five universal exhibitions, held in Paris in the second half of the 19th century (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900). For this period, exhibition data are available at a more disaggregated level than export data, on which RCA and ECI are typically based. This is the first application of ECI to the pre-Second World War era. A significant relation is observed between ECI, the level of GDP per capita, and the latter's long-run growth. Furthermore, the evolution of RCA and ECI reveals processes of structural change and economic development, notably the emergence of Germany and Switzerland, which developed along the technological paradigms of the second industrial revolution and thus attained positions of technological and economic primacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimated labor force participation rates among free women in the pre-Civil War period were exceedingly low. This is due, in part, to cultural or societal expectations of the role of women and the lack of thorough enumeration by Census takers. This paper develops an augmented labor force participation rate for free women in 1860 and compares it with the augmented rate for 1920 and today. Our methodology identifies women who are likely providing informal and unenumerated labor for market production in support of a family business, that is, unreported family workers. These individuals are not coded in the original data as formally working, but are likely to be engaged in the labor force on the basis of the self-employment of other relatives in their household. Unreported family workers are classified into four categories: farm, merchant, craft, and boardinghouse keepers. Using microdata, the inclusion of these workers more than triples the free female labor force participation rate in the 1860 Census from 16 percent to 57 percent, more than doubles the participation rate in the 1920 Census from 24 percent to 50 percent, and has a small effect on the currently measured rate of 56 percent (2015-2019 American Community Survey). This suggests that rather than a steep rise from a very low level in the female labor force participation rate since 1860, it has in fact always been high and fairly stable over time. In contrast, the effect of including unreported family workers in the male augmented labor force participation rate is relatively small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to a growing literature on long-term trends and drivers of pre-industrial inequality by providing new stylized facts on the evolution of income inequality in Ghana from 1891 to 1960. Using newly constructed social tables, we estimate the Gini coefficient for seven consecutive decades at a time in which the adoption and expansion of cocoa cultivation transformed the Ghanaian economy. Income inequality was already high in 1891, prior to the spread of cocoa cultivation, and it remained stable for four decades. Following a small decline in the early 1930s, inequality increased, reaching its highest level at the end of the colonial era. The expansion of cocoa cultivation and increasing cocoa incomes contributed to persistent high inequality levels until the 1930s. By contrast, the increase in inequality from 1930 to 1960 was largely due to the rising incomes of government employees, skilled workers, and commercial workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that Muslim military conquest (632–1100 CE) generated an institutional equilibrium with deleterious long-run political economy effects. This equilibrium was predicated on mamluk institutions: the use of elite slave soldiers (mamluks) and non-hereditary property rights over agricultural lands to compensate them (iqta). This paper evaluates this historical narrative by exploring the accuracy of its initial step. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I show that conquest changed institutions in conquered territories. I then provide suggestive evidence that the presence and efficacy of mamluk institutions affected this institutional configuration and that leaders survived longer in power during the conquest period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines knowledge spillovers across ethnic boundaries. Using the case of skilled German immigrants in the Russian Empire, we study technology adoption among Russian peasants. We find that distance to German settlements predicts the prevalence of heavy iron ploughs, fanning mills and wheat sowing among Russians, who traditionally ploughed with a light wooden ard and sowed rye. The main channel of technology adoption was German fairs. We show that heavy ploughs increased the labor productivity of Russian peasants. However, communication barriers precluded Russians from adopting skill-intensive occupations like blacksmithing, mechanics, carpentry, and other crafts. The results suggest that skilled immigrants may enhance local development through the introduction of advanced tools without transmitting their skills to a receiving society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]