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For most of the classical gold standard era, Italy was not formally committed to gold, instead the lira “shadowed” gold. The remarkable stability of the lira exchange rate raises the question of why Italy did not move to official convertibility when it could have gained gold standard benefits at a seemingly low cost. The answer to this puzzle lies in the management of the Italy’s large foreign debt. Although denominated in lire, holders of the debt had the privilege of converting their coupons into gold at the official exchange rate in Paris. This arrangement offered the government an opportunity to temporarily exploit domestic bondholders who found it difficult to circumvent the barriers to arbitrage. In times of fiscal problems, the government gained some seignorage while the lira was allowed a limited depreciation. Shadowing the official gold rate, lost some of the possible benefits of convertibility but gave the government fiscal flexibility. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A birth certificate establishes a child's legal identity and age, but few quantitative estimates of the significance of birth registration exist. Birth registration laws were enacted by U.S. states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using 1910-1930 census data, this study finds that minimum working age legislation was twice as effective in reducing under-aged employment if children had been born with a birth registration law, with positive implications for school attendance. There is some evidence that registration laws also improved the enforcement of schooling laws for younger children. A retrospective analysis with the 1960 census shows that the long-term effect of registration laws was to increase educational attainment by approximately 0.1 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine econometrically the real effects of paper money's introduction into colonial New England over the 1703-1749 period. Departing from earlier analyses that focus primarily on the depreciation of paper money in the region, we show that expansion of the money stock promoted growth in modern sector activity and not the other way around. We also find that bills emitted for seigniorage purposes had a positive effect on the modern sector, while bills issued through loan banks did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 article contributes to the debate on institutions and economic development by examining the historical link between land access inequality and education. Using information from the 464 districts existent in mid-19th century Spain, this paper confirms that there is a negative relationship between the fraction of farm labourers and male literacy rates. This result does not disappear when a large set of potential confounding factors are included in the analysis. The use of the Reconquest as a quasi-natural experiment allows us to rule out further concerns about potential endogeneity. In addition, controlling for different sources of spatial dependence does not explain away this result either. By analysing the rural–urban divide and the gender-specific information on the number of schools and teachers, as well as schooling enrolment rates, this paper also explores the mechanisms behind the observed relationship. As well as supply factors, our results show that demand effects also played a significant role in explaining the negative impact of inequality on education. [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]

During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniorage - revenue that the government derived by using the newly-printed Treasury notes to purchase the goods and services it required. We argue that the bifurcation of the Confederate Congress into two groups – those legislators that represented the Confederacy's interior and those from areas no longer under Confederate control – contributed to the adoption of the reforms. Our findings indicate that representing an area outside of the rebel government's control increased the likelihood that a legislator would support efforts to reform the currency by over 90 percent. In addition, our results indicate that the rate of monetary expansion in the South was below that which would have maximized the revenue from seigniorage. We find that the reforms reduced the flow of seigniorage by approximately 57 percent, depriving the Confederate government of much-needed revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On average, per pupil expenditures were much lower in schools attended by African-American children than in schools attended by whites during the period of de jure segregation. Little is known, however, about what motivated school boards to maintain this inequality or why they funded African-American schools at all. Using newly collected data on schools in early twentieth-century Georgia and exploiting a funding shock resulting from the rules regarding appropriations from the State School Fund, this paper examines how school boards divvied up the proceeds of exogenous shifts in school budgets by race. In response to a one dollar per pupil budget cut, instructional expenditures in white schools fell by $1.21 per pupil, while they remained almost unchanged in African-American schools. Thus, whites, rather than African Americans, bore the brunt of budget cuts, indicating that there was little fat to trim from the budgets of African-American schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper measures real wages in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Kursk over 1853-1937. Workers in construction and large scale industry are studied. For the imperial period and the NEP, new series of prices are collected from archival and printed sources, and these radically revise previous measures of inflation. Russian living standards grew little between 1853 and 1913, but doubled between 1913 and 1928 due to the exchange rate, price, and employment policies followed by the regime. Real wages dropped to their pre-War level between 1928 and 1937, as the social surplus was mobilized for the industrialization drive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of colonial Jamaican real incomes and income inequality. We collect local prices to construct cost of living and purchasing power parity indicators. The latter lowers Jamaica's GDP per capita compared with the rest of the Atlantic economy. We also compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that, being a net food importer, the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose steeply during the American War of Independence, and low standards of living, particularly for its enslaved population, but also for the free unskilled population that competed with slave labor. Our results also show that due to its extreme poverty for the many in the middle of great wealth for the few, Jamaica was the most unequal place yet studied in the pre-modern world. Furthermore, all of these characteristics applied to the free population alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper exploits data on a set of traded goods to undertake the first comprehensive empirical analysis of market integration between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from 1469 to 1914. Computing dynamic factor models via Bayesian inference, we overcome such data constraints as missing observations and a small sample size. The results of this analysis suggest that there were persistent market linkages until the first half of the 19th century, followed by a decline in price convergence. We also find that the intensity of Ottoman–European conflict had a negative effect on integration, especially during the 1844–1914 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In this paper, I investigate the "little divergence" of late medieval and early modern Europe, focusing on the long run response of real wages to demographic changes. Through a quantitative analysis of the 14th–18th centuries series of real wages and population shocks in fourteen European cities, I find that in four north-western cities (Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, and Oxford) the urban real wages were detached from population before the Industrial Revolution, while, in the central and southern Europe wages had a moderate or negative response to population changes. In addition, I show that this different response dates back to the 16th century. I claim, that these two results support three possibly non alternative interpretations of the "little divergence", either based on changes of fertility regimes, rural and urban labor organizations, or on the onset, in early modern north-western Europe, of non strictly Malthusian growth mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring how maternal and paternal grandfathers predict the economic status of their grandsons and granddaughters. We document that the relationship between the income of grandparents and grandchildren differs by gender. The socio-economic status of grandsons is more strongly associated with the status of paternal grandfathers than maternal grandfathers. The status of maternal grandfathers is more strongly correlated with the status of granddaughters than grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We argue that the findings can be rationalized by a model of gender-specific intergenerational transmission of traits and imperfect assortative mating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assembles heating fuel prices for the U.S. state of Vermont, from the colonial era to the present, in order to test whether energy fuel prices and energy service prices have diverged over this time period. Prior authors have reported evidence of a significant difference between long run energy fuel prices and energy service prices. However, this is the first analysis to pose this question beginning in the context of colonial America. In accord with earlier work focused in the U.K. the paper reports a significant divergence in fuel and service prices. In this setting real heating fuel prices increased over the 220 year time period by a factor of between 15 and 20. In contrast, heating service prices increased by a factor of two. Expressed in labor units, heating service prices have fallen in Vermont by 25%, while fuel prices were essentially flat. Finally, over this two century time period in Vermont and the U.K., the rate of change in service prices expressed in labor units is remarkably similar: − 1.1% and − 0.9%, per annum, respectively. [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]

Market transaction data are used to estimate the quantity of specie in circulation. This estimate is used to provide the first comprehensive measure of a colony''s money supply and, along with data on population and prices, to retest the quantity theory of money and measure output growth using the equation of exchange. Output growth is found to depend on periodization and the extent that rising commercialization increased the velocity of circulation. Specie was becoming relatively less scarce as the Revolution approached, and movements in specie and paper currency both offset and reinforced each other depending on the period of analysis. (JEL N11, N21, E42, E51) [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reexamines the first viable and a still leading explanation for mid-twentieth century baby booms: Richard Easterlin's relative income hypothesis. He suggested that when incomes are higher than material aspirations (formed in childhood), birth rates would rise. This paper uses microeconomic data to formulate a measure of an individual's relative income. The use of microeconomic data allows the researcher to control for both state fixed effects and cohort fixed effects, both have been absent in previous examinations of Easterlin's hypothesis. The results of the empirical analysis are consistent with Easterlin's assertion that relative income influenced fertility decisions, although the effect operates only through childhood income. When the estimated effects are contextualized, they explain 12% of the U.S. baby boom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics in Italy's industrial sector between 1911 and 1951 and explores their links with changes in competition policy. It relies on a newly compiled dataset and provides fresh labour productivity estimates, disaggregated by industrial branch. Its main finding is that the switch to a more interventionist industrial policy enacted by the Fascist regime circa 1926–7 caused a marked slowdown in productivity growth. Nor was the government's decision to relocate resources from the traditional to the more modern industrial branches successful in lifting productivity dynamics: our shift-share analysis shows that the contribution of (static and dynamic) structural change from old to new industries to productivity growth was negligible. Finally, we find that the increase in the levels and growth rates of concentration, induced by specific Fascist policies, were associated with lower productivity levels and growth rates. This paper thus casts a shadow on the optimist accounts of Fascist industrial policy and confirms the findings of a revisionist literature minimising the positive role played by the State in the earlier stages of Italian industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new interpretation of the historically controversial role of Italian latifundia. Relying on standard economic theory, the paper explores a simple though neglected mechanism linking land inequality and inefficiency: market power. In underdeveloped economies with serious constraints on labor mobility, high ownership concentration will endow landowners with market power in local labor markets. The resulting equilibrium explains many of the often criticized features of latifundia, without the need to factor in irrational behavior (the preferred explanation of Italian traditional historians) or social institutions and capital market imperfections (explanations advanced by economists in different contexts). According to the model here explored the main effects of inequality are of a distributive rather than of a productive nature. The market power hypothesis is strongly supported by the available quantitative evidence provided by an unexploited dataset on all local labor markets of Italy at the end of the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses how the disease environment, proxied by infant mortality rates, influenced children's growth in interwar Japan. We use data drawn from government records from 1929 to 1939 which report the mean heights of boys and girls in school at each age (6–18) for each of Japan's 47 prefectures. We focus on two key questions: (1) how important was the disease environment in infancy in shaping the growth pattern of children? and (2) were shocks to child health more salient in the first thousand days of life, often held as a critical window to prevent stunting, or at later ages? We quantify the characteristics of the growth pattern of birth cohorts using the SITAR growth model and then relate the predicted SITAR parameters to infant mortality in the year of birth. In addition, we test for instantaneous effects of morbidity, proxied by infant mortality, on growth at ages 6–11. We find that infant mortality in early life did not have a strong influence on the growth pattern of children, but there were statistically significant and economically meaningful instantaneous effects of infant mortality on child height at ages 6–11 for both boys and girls. This suggests that interventions outside of the thousand-day critical window can be effective and that the secular increase in height in interwar Japan was more strongly influenced by cumulative responses to the health environment across child development rather than simply improvements in early life health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the impact of Canada’s adoption of protectionist trade policy in 1879 on Canadian welfare. Under the National Policy, the Canadian average weighted tariff increased from 14% to 21%. The conventional view is that this was a distortionary policy that negatively affected Canadian welfare. We argue that this view is incomplete because it ignores general equilibrium effects. Using a multi-industry general equilibrium model with differentiated goods, we show that tariffs’ impact on welfare can potentially be positive, even for small open economies, due to their impact on domestic terms of trade and government revenues. We apply these theoretical insights in a reassessment of the static impact that the National Policy had on Canadian welfare in 1879, using newly compiled granular trade and production data, and newly estimated historically contemporaneous import demand elasticities. Our results suggest that, although a multilateral move to free trade would have resulted in the best welfare outcome for Canadians, the National Policy’s tariff increases actually improved Canadian welfare by approximately 0.15% of GDP in 1879 – an amount equivalent to approximately $2.3 billion 2016 USD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the causal effects of monetary policy on the British economy during the classical gold standard. Based on the narrative identification approach, I find that following a one percentage point monetary tightening, unemployment rose by 0.9 percentage points, while inflation fell by 3.1 percentage points. In addition, monetary policy shocks accounted for a third of macroeconomic volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional wisdom in economics holds that institutional change runs from political institutions to economic ones, with the distribution of political power affecting the creation of property rights and rule of law. This hierarchy of institutions has been observed in macroeconomic policy, where it has long been understood that there are political incentives for economic mismanagement, namely the creation of inflation. But are there longer-term effects of currency manipulation on the rule of law in a country? That is, does the hierarchy not always hold? This paper answers this question by focusing on a specific case of monetary instability, the newly-independent Second Polish Republic of 1918 to 1939. Using appropriate econometric techniques on a new database of historical data, I find that monetary profligacy correlates strongly with significantly lower levels of the rule of law. This result is robust to several tests and most specifications, including the use of a new variable for measuring access to the political system. The results suggest that monetary instability is a threat to political institutions in its own right, eroding the rule of law in addition to creating macroeconomic difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Civil War destroyed a substantial fraction of southern wealth and emancipation transferred human capital to the formerly enslaved. The prevailing view of most economic historians is that the southern planter elite was able to retain its relative status despite these shocks. Previous studies have been hampered, however, by limits on the ability to link individuals between census years, and scholars have been forced to focus on persistence within one or a few counties. Recent advances in electronic access to the Federal Census manuscripts now make it possible to link individuals without these constraints. In this paper, we exploit the ability to search the full manuscript census to construct a sample that links top wealth holders in 1870 to their 1860 census records. Although there was an entrenched southern planter elite that retained their economic status, we find evidence that the turmoil of the 1860s opened greater opportunities for mobility in the South than was the case in the North, resulting in much greater turnover among wealthy southerners than among comparably wealthy northerners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a unique data set – comprising 125 years of individual bank balance sheets – to investigate the effect of regulatory changes on the evolution of bank competition in Italy. The historical depth of this data set makes it possible to assess the impact of infrequent regulatory reforms that drastically changed the banking sector in the 1930s and in the 1980s. We compare several indicators to analyze how bank competition evolves, and we find that its evolution exhibits a yo-yo pattern induced by the changes in regulatory regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally argued that, in the context of Imperial Germany, public primary education was used to form “loyal citizens” and to build a nation. In this paper we analyze to what extent state spending on primary education affected participation at general elections and votes for pro-nationalist parties. We combine census data on the composition of school funding with federal election data at the level of 199 constituencies in five-year intervals from 1886 to 1911. Panel estimates of models with constituency and time-fixed effects show that an increase in the share of central spending is positively related to the vote share for pro-nationalist parties. Results on voter turnout are weaker and less clear cut. Estimates of models with lagged state spending by category of expenditure are consistent with the role of indoctrination of public primary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in anthropometrics continue to find a wage-height premium in modern economies despite most productivity not contingent on physical strength. These authors argue that height is a proxy for cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, which earns the positive return. In this paper, I collected data on over 2,200 English and Welsh railwaymen from staff ledgers to test if the same relationship held during the Victorian and Edwardian period. Using an OLS model, it is found that a wage-height premium existed. Applying the same model to different subgroups of railwaymen, it was found that the premium only accrued to taller men working in skilled grades that required a higher cognitive and non-cognitive skill to strength ratio. No such premium existed in the physically taxing entry-level railway grades. A probit regression finds that taller Great Western signalmen working in Wales did not have a lower probability of receiving a fine upon committing an infraction; a finding that contradicts heightism as an explanation of the wage-height premium. I conclude that taller railwaymen benefited because height indirectly measured their cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, not their strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Ensenada Cadastre, a unique database on Castilian households circa 1750, this paper provides new evidence on the relationship between human capital and male labor earnings in eighteenth-century Spain. Human capital is proxied by individual indicators of basic skills (literacy and numeracy) and of occupational skills. We employ a Mincerian regression approach and find a positive and statistically significant association between skills and average earnings. Although we cannot reliably assess causality in the observed relationship, these findings are robust to conditioning on household composition, job characteristics, and place of residence. Nonetheless, further testing indicates that the earnings gradient associated with literacy is driven mainly by unobservable variables (e.g., ability, family background) that explain both the worker's acquisition of this skill and his earnings. The estimated associations are stronger for urban than for rural workers and are highly heterogeneous across activity sectors. Our analysis reveals that workers with higher skills were not only better remunerated in their main occupation but also more likely to diversify their earnings through “by-employment”. Finally, quantile regression analysis indicates that earnings disparities—between workers with different skills—were much smaller at the lower than the upper end of the earnings distribution. This evidence suggests that, in pre-industrial Castile, human capital may have contributed to inequality of earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents, for the first time, municipality- and occupation-level estimates of income inequality between individuals in a European country in the nineteenth century, using a combination of several detailed data sets for Norway in the late 1860s. Urban incomes were on average 4.5 times as high as rural incomes, and the average city Gini coefficient was twice the average rural municipality Gini. All high- or medium-income occupation groups exhibited substantial within-occupation income inequality. Across municipalities, income inequality is higher in high-income municipalities, and lower in muncipalities with high levels of fisheries and pastoral agriculture. While manufacturing activity is positively correlated with income inequality, the association is not apparent when other economic factors such as the mode of food production is accounted for. The income Gini for Norway as a whole is found to have been 0.546, slightly higher than estimates for the UK and US in the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key question in the design of public assistance to the needy is how allocation of responsibility for funding and decision-making across different levels of government influences the level and type of assistance provided. The New Deal era was a period in which this allocation changed significantly in the United States, as provision of public assistance shifted from local governments to states and the federal government, accompanied by a large increase in government transfer payments. Focusing on assistance to the elderly and using variation in state laws governing the division of funding between local and state governments for the Old Age Assistance (OAA) Program, this paper investigates the responsiveness of OAA payments and recipiency to local government funding shares. Payments per elderly resident were significantly lower in states with higher local funding shares, driven largely by reductions in recipiency. The baseline results suggest that had local governments needed to fund half of OAA payments in 1939, on the lower end of local funding shares prior to the New Deal, the share of the elderly receiving OAA would have been 5 percent rather than 22 percent, and perhaps even lower. More speculative results suggest that greater local funding led to lower representation of blacks among OAA recipients relative to their share of the population, particularly in the South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of mechanical refrigeration on temporal and spatial price relationships for regional egg markets in the United States, 1880–1911. Notably, this period encompasses an era in which widespread adoption of mechanical refrigeration facilitated the ability to store otherwise perishable commodities. This development in turn altered observed price dynamics for many perishables, including fresh eggs. We use a class of time series models, time–varying autoregressions (TVARs), to document both the structural change and the corresponding impact on spatial price dynamics for U.S. regional egg price relationships during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our results reveal that, while spatially distinct markets remained integrated, the opportunity to store eggs over time often resulted in weaker spatial price relationships for eggs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established by a three person committee in 1914, the structure of the Federal Reserve System has remained essentially unchanged ever since, despite criticism at the time and over ensuing decades. This paper examines the original selection of cities for Reserve Banks and branches, and placement of district boundaries. We show that each aspect of the Fed's structure reflected the preferences of national banks, including adjustments to district boundaries after 1914. Further, using newly-collected data on interbank connections, we find that banker preferences mirrored established correspondent relationships. The Federal Reserve was thus formed on top of the structure that it was largely meant to replace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]