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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]

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 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]

Drawing on a new data set of monthly observations, this paper investigates similarities and differences in the discount rate policy of 12 European countries under the Classical Gold Standard. It asks, in particular, whether the bank rate policy followed different patterns in core and peripheral countries. Based on OLS, ordered probit and pooled estimations of central bank discount rate behaviour, two main findings emerge: firstly, the discount rate decisions of core countries were motivated by a desire to keep the exchange-rate within the gold points. In stark contrast, the discount rate decisions of peripheral countries reflected changes in the domestic cover ratio. The main reason for the difference in behaviour was the limited effectiveness of the discount rate tool for peripheral countries, which resulted in more frequent gold point violations. Consequently, peripheral countries relied on high reserve levels and oriented their discount rate policy towards maintaining the reserve level. Secondly, interest rate decisions were influenced by Berlin and London to a similar degree, suggesting that the European branch of the Classical Gold Standard was less London-centred than had been hitherto assumed. In establishing general patterns of discount rate policy, this paper aims to contribute to the wider discussion on monetary policy under the gold standard and the core-periphery dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent of political connections of firms, and examines the implications for firm values, using firm-level data from prewar Japan. We collect data from publicly traded companies in Japan in the late 1920s and early 1930s regarding their directors and presence of members of the House of Representatives, stock prices, and financial performance. We find that almost 20% of these publicly traded companies had political connections through politician directors. In particular, firms in regulated industries, including the electrical utility and railroad industries, were more likely to have political connections. Regression analyses reveal that the stock returns of firms with newly- obtained political connections improved from the pre-election to post-election periods. Furthermore, this positive effect accrued to non-regulated industries, while it did not to regulated industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we quantify the difference between public and private prices of residential electricity immediately before and after major federal reforms in the 1930s and 1940s. Previous research found that public prices were lower in a sample of large, urban markets. Based on new data covering over 15,000 markets and nearly all electricity generated for residential consumption, we find that the difference between public and private prices was small in 1935 and negligible in 1940 for typical levels of monthly consumption. These findings are consistent with a market for ownership that helped to discipline electricity prices during this period. That is, private rents were mitigated by the threat that municipalities would use public ownership to respond to constituent complaints and public rents were limited by electoral competition and the growth of private provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A traditional education system, based on the Confucian classics, was a pillar of imperial China's social structure for centuries, preparing elites for a series of highly competitive exams conferring gentry status and civil service positions. Reformers in late imperial China called for the modernization of educational institutions, seeing in Western education the skills necessary to develop China's economy. In the late 19th century, the traditional education system was joined by a “modern”, Western track, which offered teaching in science, math, social science, law, and engineering. In this paper, early 20th century employee records from the Tianjin-Pukou Railroad are analyzed to identify differences in labor market outcomes associated with study in the traditional and modern educational systems. The employee records reveal that modern and traditional education were both associated with wage premiums, but that these were significantly larger for individuals trained at high levels in the modern system, especially those trained in engineering. Individuals trained in the traditional system worked disproportionately in the clerical department of the railroad, while those with modern education were more often in managerial and technical roles. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that these results are not driven by sorting into educational institutions according to ability. These findings indicate that beyond years of schooling, the content of schooling can play an important role in the process of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the hypothesis that the cultural distance between migrants and natives impedes the provision of public goods. The Taiping Rebellion was a shock that caused groups without a history of shared governance to be relocated to the same region. We use a unique historical dataset of surnames in the Lower Yangzi of China to construct a measure of the cultural distance between migrants and natives (MNCD). We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the MNCD is associated with a decrease of over 0.19 public primary schools per 10,000 persons in the early twentieth century. The results survive various robustness checks and an instrumental variable analysis that exploits the pre-existing cultural distances between the native and the nearby population. Evidence from the timing of when the MNCD takes effect suggests that the primary mechanism runs from migrant-native cultural distance through quality of collective decision-making to modern primary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a quantitative history of the homicide rate in Qing China and investigates its social and economic drivers. Estimates based on historical archives indicate that this annual rate ranged between 0.35 and 1.47 per 100,000 inhabitants during the 1661–1898 period, a low level unmatched by Western Europe until the late 19th century. China's homicide rate rose steadily from 1661 to 1821 but declined gradually thereafter until the turn of the century. Although extreme, homicide represents a random sampling of the entire distribution of interpersonal violence; hence the homicide rate serves as a proxy for overall violence, and its rise implies a decline in personal security. We use national and cross-provincial panel data to show that population density, state capacity, local self-governance, interregional grain market integration, and grain price level (which captures crop failure and other survival distress) are all statistically significant drivers of the homicide rate in 18th- and 19th-century China. [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]

Under the classical gold standard (1880–1914), the Bank of France maintained a stable discount rate while the Bank of England changed its rate very frequently. Why did the policies of these central banks, the two pillars of the gold standard, differ so much? How did the Bank of France manage to keep a stable rate despite international constraints? This paper tackles these questions and shows that the domestic asset portfolio of the Bank of France played a crucial role in smoothing international shocks and in maintaining the stability of the discount rate. As a result, the French discount rate was only changed in exceptional circumstances, for which a change in the English rate was not a sufficient condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the historical narrative record to determine whether inflation expectations shifted during the second quarter of 1933, precisely as the recovery from the Great Depression took hold. First, by examining the historical news record and the forecasts of contemporary business analysts, we show that inflation expectations increased dramatically. Second, using an event-study approach, we identify the effect of the key events that shifted inflation expectations on financial markets. Third, we gather new evidence—both quantitative and narrative—that indicates that the shift in inflation expectations played a causal role in stimulating the recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1624-1776 Sweden minted intrinsic value copper coins, alongside silver coins. One purpose behind introducing the copper standard was to use its monopoly position at the European markets to manipulate the international copper prices, implementing a kind of copper mercantilism. This paper presents a model of an early modern copper monopolist that could price discriminate between two different uses for copper: copper for export and copper for minting. The paper concludes that authorities did not completely conform to this rent-seeking model, since there were also other considerations behind minting policy, such as providing a stable monetary system. The model shows that under profit-maximisation minting should have been even higher and the price of copper money lower, but at periods minting and prices approached the optimal state. In the 17th century, the market for copper money was probably too small relative the huge copper production, but by the 1720s and 1730s, when copper production had declined, the copper standard functioned more smoothly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the medical histories of a sample of 25,000 Union Army soldiers and veterans to study the determinants of diagnosis, discharge, and mortality from tuberculosis. We find that water and airborne diseases during the war contributed significantly to the presence of tuberculosis. Height and a higher body mass index (BMI) are also associated with protection against TB but these effects are not always robust. As an upper bound, we estimate that the contribution of modern gains in height and in BMI to the mortality decline of tuberculosis ranges from one-fourth to one-half with the rest explained by the decline in the prevalence of water and airborne diseases, especially diarrhea, dysentery, and typhoid played. The paper finds weaker support for alternative hypotheses that rely on occupational influences and exogenous changes in the virulence of tuberculosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently historians have complicated their understanding of networks. In particular, they have started to assess the role of networks in civic and formal arenas. This paper posits a quantitative methodology for a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of mercantile networks within this environment. It uses visual analytics of Liverpool's business networks comprising political, trade, social and cultural institutions to assess their role in the changing social and economic climate during the period 1750-1810. This paper demonstrates the dynamic role of networks in the shaping of a metropolitan economy and the interplay between the two. In addition, it posits that, as is the case for regional clusters, there is a life cycle of networks. In this way, we are able to see how the networks sustained, nurtured and transformed social and economic activity during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the evolution of income inequality in central Spain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taking as case study the province of Guadalajara. The first part of the paper presents the sources and the dataset that was created to estimate income inequality using grain tithes. The second section shows that through the period grain represented the lion share of total income and therefore that it can be used as a reliable proxy. The following part of the paper introduces an analysis of income inequality in the province during the period 1690-1800 and concludes that inequality decreased during the last third of the eighteenth century. Finally the paper addresses this unexpected result and concludes that it was consequence of the success of the land reform carried out by the central government in the late 1760s. The reform was a success in Guadalajara, thanks to the characteristics of its population and the lack of bargaining power of pressure groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper very briefly surveys current research on Asian economic development, and also discusses several recent papers on the contributions of economic history to understanding development. I then review the contributions of the papers in this special volume of Explorations in light of these two literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a new source of evidence we explore the mobility of mid-nineteenth century seamen. Among seamen born outside London, the tall, the literate and those who could remember the exact day, month and year when they were born, characteristics that we suggest mark them out as men with more choices in life, were more likely to migrate to London. Contrary to what might be inferred from contemporary descriptions of urban disamenities or from persistent differentials in mortality, London appears as a desirable destination for those who could choose. The conclusion must be that London was not so bad, and we should adjust our perception of the problems of urbanisation accordingly, with implications for the wider debate on the standard of living during the industrial revolution. The paper’s methodological interest is the use of height as an explanatory variable in the analysis of migration. Although correlated with other variables that are routinely used in anthropometric studies to indicate life chances, such as literacy and the ability to know and recall date of birth, height has empirical advantages over these alternatives in that it exhibits higher levels of significance. Moreover while literacy and heaping are in essence binary variables, height is a (near) continuous one, and one that allows us to test for linear and non-linear responses, as we do with interesting results in this paper. Perhaps the most fruitful use of height in historical analyses may turn out to be as an explanatory variable; at the very least such a research strategy provides anthropometric historians with further opportunities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper analyzes and compares different ways of assessing how people perceived impending threats of war in the past. Conventional Nordic historiography of World War II claims there were few, if any, people in the Nordic countries who perceived a significantly increased threat of war between 1938 and early 1940. At the same time, historical methods face problems when it comes to capturing the often tacitly held beliefs of a large number of people in the past. In this paper, we analyze these assessments by looking at sudden shifts in sovereign debt yields and spreads in the Nordic bond markets at that time. Our results suggest that Nordic contemporaries indeed perceived significant war risk increases around the time of major war-related geopolitical events. While these findings question some—but not all—of standard Nordic World War II historiography, they also demonstrate the value of analyzing historical market prices to reassess the often tacitly held views and opinions of large groups of people in the past. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines new data on wealth and wealth accumulation by blacks and whites in Calhoun County, South Carolina between 1910 and 1919. Despite focusing on a single county, the data utilized in this paper make it possible to explore property accumulation by southern blacks and whites in new ways. Unlike previous studies, this one provides information on both real quantities and dollar assessments. This breakdown reveals that the rapid accumulation of property by blacks was entirely real and not due in part to an increasingly discriminatory assessment policy. By merging the assessment data with individual-level census records, it is possible to examine how wealth and wealth accumulation were influenced by race, gender, age, occupation, and literacy. In particular, the effect of literacy on the wealth of black men in 1910 was found to be economically strong in high wealth quantiles but weak in low wealth quantiles. By 1919, the impact of literacy on the wealth of black men had become economically important across the board. Furthermore, literacy had a significant influence on the relative size of wealth accumulations but offered little protection against low accumulations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper extends the analysis of “Agricultural Property and the 1948 Palestinian Refugees: Assessing the Loss” [Lewis, F.D., 1996. Agricultural Property and the 1948 Palestinian Refugees: Assessing the Loss, Explorations in Economic History 33, 169–194] to non-agricultural property. The urban property abandoned by refugees is valued on the basis of transfer prices, tax payable, and inferences about rent. The estimated value of the property is much higher than was reported by the United Nations Conciliation Commission in 1951. Still the total implied by this paper and [Lewis, 1996] is such that if Israel were to pay the overall loss as compensation, the transfers are unlikely to have a serious impact on its economy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper analyzes the impact of infrastructure investment on Spanish economic growth between 1850 and 1935. Using new infrastructure data and VAR techniques, this paper shows that the growth impact of local-scope infrastructure investment was positive, but returns to investment in large nation-wide networks were not significantly different from zero. Two complementary explanations are suggested for the last result. On the one hand, public intervention and the application of non-efficiency investment criteria were very intense in large network construction. On the other hand, returns to new investment in large networks might have decreased dramatically once the basic links were constructed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper argues that bilateral spatial price models do not estimate bilateral transactions costs when trade with third cities is important. The paper examines trans-Atlantic gold arbitrage during the gold standard era by assembling a database indicating when trans-Atlantic gold shipments occurred. It shows that two-way gold shipments between New York and London frequently occurred prior to 1901. However, in 1901 gold shipments to London ceased and were replaced by triangular arbitrage shipments through Paris. Consequently, New York and London gold price data cannot be used to estimate New York–London transactions costs after 1901, as no trade took place. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, the divergence between popular and professional opinion on speculation in general and futures markets in particular is explored. Along the way, a synopsis of prevailing popular attitudes on futures markets is presented, and an outline of a formal model of futures markets and its implications for commodity price volatility are sketched. The heart of the analysis is drawn from the historical record on the establishment and prohibition of futures markets. Briefly, the results presented in this paper strongly suggest that futures markets were associated with—and most likely caused—lower commodity price volatility. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential sources of popular antagonism against futures markets. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the course of the value of the paper money issued by the Republic of Texas in New Orleans, from 1837 to 1842, using a newly-constructed weekly time series of quotations, and focusing on the possibility of market manipulation. Specifically, during 1841, misleading information concerning a possible foreign loan reached New Orleans three different times. The first time, the information substantially raised the value of Texas Treasury Notes. The second time, the information raised the value, but to a lesser extent. The third time, the information had no impact. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper seeks to answer the titular question of what drove commodity market integration in the 19th century. Using grain markets during the first wave of globalization as a testing ground, the paper builds on the insights of the contemporary trade literature and the economic history of the 19th century and relates levels of market integration to cross-sectional and temporal variations in transport technology, geography, monetary regimes, commercial networks/policy, and conflict. The results of this decomposition analysis are interesting on two counts: first, they verify the commonality of experience of the 19th and late 20th centuries; second, they suggest a very strong role for the commercial, diplomatic, and monetary environment in which market integration took place. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper explores the development of water supplies by private ditch companies during the California Gold Rush. Using data taken from newspaper stories, mining camp by-laws, and state Supreme Court and district court cases, the paper documents the presence of institutional conditions that were unfavorable to support private water investments including property rights uncertainty, imperfect capital markets, and significant contractual enforcement costs that may have provided opportunities for contractual holdup by miners. Some evidence suggests that water development was likely discouraged to some extent. Nevertheless, the larger response was a major expansion in water supplies through an extensive ditch system, suggesting that there were factors that limited the ability of miners to capture rents, including various ditch company strategies to limit their exposure to opportunistic behavior and recognition by miners of their reliance on ditch companies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Theories of cartel stability assume detection is uncertain, but also unambiguous. Recent empirical studies find that cartel agreements are contractually incomplete. If so, whether an action constitutes violation may be ambiguous. While theory emphasizes the ineffectiveness of agreements that are not fully specified ex ante, recent research shows that stable cartels may often renegotiate terms to eliminate loopholes caused by incompleteness. Naturally, renegotiations can lead to breakdowns, but sometimes threats of breakdown are resolved. This paper examines the strategy adopted by Cuban negotiators to resolve a near breakdown in the International Sugar Agreement of 1931. Cuba made a threat of retaliation credible by using a strategy of brinkmanship. The paper contributes to recent empirical work, such as Levenstein [Explorations in Economic History 33 (1996) 107; Journal of Industrial Economics 45 (2) (1997) 117] and Genesove and Mullin [American Economic Review 91 (3) (2001) 379], which uses the economics of organization to interpret cartel behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, the course of intra- and international market integration in the nineteenth century Atlantic economy is investigated. The most fundamental contribution of the paper is in consistently sketching the course of commodity market integration over the long run. Additionally, this study suggests that the nineteenth century has been somewhat misread in terms of the development of markets as the evidence, especially on price convergence, points to dramatic improvements in intra- and international market integration in the years prior to the mid-century. A collective task for economic historians, then, is to link these developments with the revolutionary commercial and technological developments of the post-1850 period. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper analyses the causes of Portuguese catching-up to the European core, in the 20th century, within a growth accounting framework. It concludes that investment in human and physical capital was the main driving force of economic growth and that variation in output growth rates are attributable to changes in total factor productivity growth. The paper explains the decline in TFP growth after 1973 in terms of structural change in the industrial sector. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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]

This paper demonstrates the often repeated modern claim of significant trading in ‘shares of the societates publicanorum ’ ( partes ) during the late Roman Republic cannot be supported using the available ‘primary sources’. Building on recent contributions detailing the economy of the late Republic, in general, and the tax farming activities of the publicani , in particular, an alternative more plausible legal and commercial explanation of the ‘primary sources’ – especially In Vatinium [12.29] and Pro C. Rabiro Postumo [2.4] – is provided. [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]

Impersonal exchange increases trade and specialization opportunities, encouraging economic growth. However, it requires the support of sophisticated public institutions. This paper explains how Classical Rome provided such support in the main areas of economic activity by relying on public possession as a titling device, enacting rules to protect innocent acquirers in agency contexts, enabling the extended family to act as a contractual entity, and diluting the enforcement of personal obligations which might collide with impersonal exchange. Focusing on the institutions of impersonal exchange, it reaches a clear positive conclusion on the market-facilitating role of the Roman state because such institutions have unambiguously positive effects on markets. Moreover, being impersonal, these beneficial effects are also widely distributed across society instead of accruing disproportionately to better-connected individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have increasingly turned to height data to gain insight into a population's standard of living. Because height measures are used when other data are unavailable, testing their reliability can be difficult, and concerns over sample selection have led to several vigorous debates within the heights literature. In this paper, I use a unique contemporaneous census to gauge the extent of selection into a contested sample of American Indian heights. I have linked people from the 1892 Boas sample of the Cherokee Nation to the 1890 Cherokee Census. An initial analysis finds evidence of negative selection into the Boas sample. A detailed examination of those measured reveals a more complex story. Two distinct groups are present within the data. The first group consists of 64 members of the Cherokee elite. Their households owned more land, invested more in improvements to their land, and had higher literacy rates. The remainder of the Boas sample is poor relative to both the elite and the rest of the Cherokee Nation. Part, but not all, of this difference is due to their residential location. Forty percent of the Boas sample lived in poorest district of Cherokee Nation. These differences in wealth between the two groups were mirrored by a fairly dramatic difference in average heights. The average height of all men in elite group was 173.9 cm while the non-elite were several centimeters shorter at just 171.2 cm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 did enormous damage to industries in Tokyo Prefecture. Around 40% of the buildings in Tokyo Prefecture were completely burnt or destroyed. In this paper, we investigate whether this temporary shock had a persistent impact on the spatial distribution of industries in Tokyo, using ward- and county-level panel data for industrial workers. It was found that while the earthquake caused mean shifts in the shares and numbers of workers, these mean shifts disappeared by the early 1930s. On the other hand, the earthquake caused shifts in the trends in the share and number of workers. The combined effects of these mean shifts and trend shifts were persistent for both the shares and the numbers of workers. The earthquake caused especially serious damage to the old industrial clusters in the southeast of Tokyo, and provided an opportunity for newly developing industrial clusters in non-damaged areas to take over the market. Further, the people and the local governments in non-damaged areas made an effort to take advantage of this opportunity to attract factories. Arguably, these forces made the impact of the earthquake on the spatial distribution of industry persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several factors influenced the composition of migrants in the early 20th century, including World War I, the Literacy Act of 1917, and the implementation of strict immigration quotas. This paper examines whether the United States' first immigration quota, established under the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, affected migrant selection. The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 severely capped the number of admittable migrants by nationality. Canadian migrants, or any migrants who resided in Canada for five consecutive years, were unrestricted by the quota and could freely migrate to the U.S. Using transcribed ship records from states bordering Canada (specifically New York, Alaska, and Washington), I compare the skills of restricted migrants to the skills of unrestricted Canadian migrants, before and after establishment of the 1921 quota. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that the quota resulted in migrants of higher skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of technological change on skill acquisition during the British Industrial Revolution. Based on a unique set of data on apprenticeships between 1710 and 1772, we show that both the number of apprentices and their share in the cohort of the fifteen year-olds increased in response to inventions. The strongest response was in the highly skilled mechanical trades. These results suggest that technological change in this period was skill biased due to the expansion of the machinery sector they induced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce a new source of data to economic history: palynological data or, in other words, information about pollen grains which are preserved in the bottom sediments of various water basins. We discuss how this data is collected and how it should be interpreted; develop new methods for aggregating this information into regional trends in agricultural output; construct an extensive dataset with a large number of pollen sites from Central Europe; and use our methods to study the economic history of Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Bohemia, Brandenburg, and Lower Saxony since the first century AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison crowding is a pervasive modern problem with deep historical roots. The long-term solution to crowding has been more prisons; the short-term solution is early release. Early release programs can be effective when they balance the savings of reduced prison costs against the costs of recidivism by released convicts. This paper uses historical data to investigate how prison officials altered their early release policies in the face of prison crowding and rising real detention costs. The empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that prison officials make use of information about the risks of recidivism revealed at trial and during incarceration to make informed decisions about whom to release and when. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people believe that the early development of sovereign debt depended on institutions, but there are two very different ways of presenting this narrative and two very different conclusions one might draw for sovereign debt today. According to the first, this was an impartial story involving executive constraints, shared governance, increased monitoring, and increased transparency — in other words things that sound unambiguously good. According to the second narrative this was a story of distributive politics. States had the best access to credit when institutions gave government creditors privileged access to decision making while restricting the influence of those who paid the taxes to reimburse debts. This was a situation where institutions fostered commitment, but at a cost, and sometimes they may not even have been welfare enhancing. In this paper I present evidence from seven centuries of European history, and I suggest that available data support the distributive politics interpretation. I then draw implications for how we think about the politics of sovereign debt today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes data on the presence of prominent individuals – that is, those with political (e.g., Members of Parliament) and aristocratic titles (e.g., lords) – on the boards of directors of English and Welsh banks from 1879 to 1909 to investigate whether the appointment of well-connected directors enhanced equity value for bank shareholders. Our analysis of panel data shows that the appointment of connected directors did not increase equity returns (as measured by the capital gain plus dividend yield on bank shares). In fact, we find that the appointment of MPs to directorships had negative effects on bank equity returns. Our event-study analysis corroborates this finding, showing that a bank's shares exhibited negative abnormal returns when their directors were elected to Parliament. Taken together, our results indicate that connected directors yielded little – or even negative – economic payoff to bank shareholders in pre-war Britain. [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]

This paper uses data on more than 4000 captives ransomed from the Barbary corsairs to track the military power of the Ottoman Empire's most powerful North African regency over time. Results suggest that as the seventeenth century advanced, Algerian-based corsairs found it increasingly difficult to capture “hard” targets. These results do not appear to be driven by changes in ransoming preferences or by other unobserved factors and provide insights into both the timing and reasons behind the military decline of the Western Islamic World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]