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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]

The Democratic Party's electoral success during the 1930s has long intrigued politicians and scholars. To gain new insight into that success, this paper examines the striking heterogeneity in county-level support for Roosevelt. Even though the Depression's effects and the New Deal's benefits were famously widespread, only some parts of the country responded with large and durable partisan shifts. One reason is that several factors, including pre-New Deal economic hardship, Dust Bowl conditions, and New Deal spending, appear to have had effects that were largely transitory (i.e., faded by 1940). A complementary reason is that swing electorates can, and did, swing both ways. By contrast, several other variables -- notably economic and demographic factors discussed in the previous literature -- are related to relatively durable shifts. Finally, heterogeneity in marginal responses may have mattered greatly to national-level Democratic success. By demonstrating which factors were transitory and which were more durable, this paper illuminates the New Deal Realignment and, more generally, the influence of economic conditions and distributive policy on voter behavior. [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]

Recovery from the Great Depression began in March 1933, simultaneous to Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. However, the pace of that recovery between that date and the Second World War was extremely uneven with some dramatic starts and stops. Between March and July 1933, manufacturing production rose 78%, production of durable goods was up 199%, total industrial production rose 57%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 71%. Then the economy contracted sharply again beginning in August 1933–the July 1933 level of industrial production was not reached again until August 1935. This paper addresses two questions. What factors were responsible for bringing about the sharp recovery in the spring of 1933 and what factors brought this short-lived economic surge to an end? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is becoming more and more urbanized at every income level, and there has been a dramatic increase in the number of mega-cities in the developing world. This has led scholars to believe that development and urbanization are not always correlated, either across space or over time. In this paper, we use historical data at both the country level and city level over the five centuries between 1500–2010 to revisit the topic of “ urbanization without growth ” (Fay and Opal, 2000). In particular, we first establish that, although urbanization and income remain highly correlated within any given year, urbanization is 25–30 percentage points higher in 2010 than in 1500 at every level of income per capita. Second, while historically this shift in urbanization rates was more noticeable at the upper tail of the income distribution, i.e. for richer countries, it is now particularly visible at the lower tail, i.e. for poorer countries. Third, these patterns suggest that different factors may have explained the shift in different periods of time. We use the discussion of these factors as an opportunity to provide a survey of the literature and summarize our knowledge of what drives the urbanization process over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic to test how household resources are reallocated in response to a health shock to one child. Using a new dataset linking census data on childhood household characteristics to adult outcomes from military enlistment records, I show that families with a child in utero during the pandemic shifted resources to the child's older siblings, leading to significantly higher educational attainments for these older siblings. These results suggest that the reallocation of household resources in response to a negative childhood health shock tended to reinforce rather than compensate for differences in endowments across children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the Great Depression, the Canadian government embarked on a stunning reversal in its commercial policy. A key element of its response was the promotion of intra-imperial trade at the Imperial Economic Conference of 1932. This paper addresses whether or not Canada was able to defy gravity and divert trade flows towards other signatories at Ottawa. The results suggest that the conference was a failure from this perspective. Potential sources of this failure include unreasonable expectations about the likely reductions in trade costs and a neglect of key considerations related to certainty and credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1900 to 1950, malaria rates declined rapidly in the southeast United States. At its peak, malaria infected over 30% of the population. Malaria declined over the period for several reasons: improvements in public infrastructure; development of new insecticides; improvements in agriculture that promoted drainage; increases in incomes; and changes in migration patterns. This paper focuses on public works constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930s and subsequent interventions during the 1940s. To estimate the relationship between these malaria programs and malaria rates, I construct a panel of annual county level malaria rates in Georgia from 1932 to 1947. Between 1932 and 1940 the malaria rate in counties that received WPA malaria projects fell from 25.9 deaths per 100,000 to 5.3 deaths per 100,000. The empirical estimates suggest that WPA malaria projects led to 9.1 fewer deaths per 100,000 or roughly 44% of the observed decline in treated counties. Additional public works constructed by the MCWA during World War II, and the introduction of DDT after 1945 completely eliminated malaria in Georgia by 1947. [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]

The nexus between trade and economic growth in Italy has been widely debated by historiography. However, there are no long run analyses on this topic that cover the whole span from Unification to present days. This paper contributes to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between real exports, imports and GDP in Italy from 1863 to 2004 by using cointegration analysis and causality tests, The outcome suggests that these variables comove in the long run but the direction of causality varies across time, In the period prior to the First World War import growth led GDP growth that in turn led export growth. Conversely, in the post-Second World War period we have a strong bidirectionality between imports and exports consequent on the increase in intra-industry trade. We also find a weak support for export-led growth and growth-led imports. This suggests that exports were not the only or the main driver of economic growth. There was probably a multiplicity of factors at work, among which high rates of capital formation and the expansion of internal demand probably stood out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50% of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 19th century, the Spanish economy went through the early stages of the industrialisation process. This process developed in parallel to the growing market integration of goods and factors as a result of the liberal reforms and the construction of the railway network, with the subsequent fall in transport costs. In that period, there were major changes in the pattern of industrial location across Spain, with an increasing spatial concentration of industrial activities between the 1850s and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and a deeper regional specialisation. What were the forces behind these changes? On the theoretical side, the Heckscher-Ohlin model suggests that the spatial distribution of economic activity is determined by comparative advantage due to factor endowments. In turn, New Economic Geography models show the existence of a bell-shaped relationship between the process of market integration and the degree of concentration of industrial activity in the territory. This paper examines empirically the determinants of industrial location in Spain between 1856 and 1929 estimating a model that nests both Heckscher-Ohlin and NEG factors and tests the relative strength of these forces, since they are not mutually exclusive and might be at work simultaneously. The analysis of the results shows that both comparative advantage and NEG-type mechanisms were determinant drivers of industrial location in Spain, although their relative strength changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The balance of payments can act as a constraint on the rate of growth of output, since it puts a limit on the growth in the level of demand to which supply can adapt. In this paper, we examine this issue for the case of Spain. using time series data extending over the period 1850-2000. Overall, the external deficit does not seem to have worked as a constraint on the growth of the Spanish economy over the long run, unless some shorter and specific subperiods, such as 1940-1959 and 1959-1974. The Spanish economy seems to have used external deficits to smooth her level of aggregate consumption, which would be supported by the finding of sustainability of current account deficits along the period of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the issue of using infant and childhood mortality as an indicator of inequality. The case is that of the United States in the 20th century. Using microdata from the 1900 and 1910 Integrated Public Use Microsamples (IPUMS), published data from the Birth Registration Area in the 1920s, results from a number of surveys, and the Linked Birth & Infant Death Files from the National Center for Health Statistics for 1991, infant and child mortality can be related to such other variables as occupation of father or mother, education of father or mother, family income, race, ethnicity, and residence. The evidence shows that, although there have been large absolute reductions in the level of infant and child mortality rates and also a reduction in the absolute levels of differences across socioeconomic groups, relative inequality has not diminished over the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with socioeconomic differences in adult mortality in southern Sweden 1815-1968, a period of transformation from an agricultural to a modern industrial society and increasing life expectancy. We use longitudinal micro-level data with information on demographic events, household structure and socioeconomic status. The main finding is that the socioeconomic gradient is a very recent phenomenon. While mortality fell in all socioeconomic groups it was not until the 1950s that a socioeconomic gradient appeared, and then only among adults in working ages. For the elderly, we find no significant mortality differentials between various social groups at any time. These results are consistent with the divergence hypothesis, although this process started much later than previously thought, and was not an immediate consequence of industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes long-term spatial developments in Finland by focusing on two predictions of the new economic geography (NEG) models: the increasing persistence of Iocational patterns and the rising dominance of growth centers. The empirical analysis is based on regional population data from 1880 to 2004. The results support the hypotheses. Evolutions in rank and rank-size distributions during the processes of industrialization and urbanization suggest increasing persistence of regional structures. The analysis of causal processes between population centers and their hinterlands shows that these regions grew hand-in-hand in the pre-war period, whereas agglomeration shadows started to come about during the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]