Abstract not available

What is the role of access to land for the decision to emigrate? We consider the case of Denmark between 1868 and 1908, when a large number of people left for America. We exploit the fact that the Danish agrarian reforms between 1784 and 1807 had differential impacts on the class of landless laborers around the country, and use detailed parish-level data police protocols of emigrants; population censuses

Romans rewarded skill in material terms, and wage data reflects this. This study develops a method for understanding the return on skilling in the Roman period by focusing on internal pay scales observed in Egyptian documents. These data reveal a modal premium of 100 and mean of 74. Roman-period returns on training compare favorably with evidence from outside Egypt, especially detailed pay scales in

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

Thousands of prospectuses offered shares to British investors at the turn of the twentieth century. We find evidence that there were informed investors who participated in the market at this time. Firms that attracted additional investor demand were more likely to be listed on the London Stock Exchange, survive longer, and achieve better long-run equity returns. We find that the exchange screened lower

This article exploits a unique district-level dataset to investigate the relationship between sugar cultivation, property rights systems and land distribution in colonial Java around the turn of the twentieth century. We demonstrate a negative and statistically significant relationship between sugar cultivation and the landholder Gini. An IV strategy, employing a newly computed index of sugar suitability

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

Can wealth shocks have intergenerational health consequences? We use the partial compensation slaveholders received after the 1834 slave emancipation in the British Cape Colony to measure the intergenerational effects of a wealth loss on longevity. We find that a greater loss of slave wealth shortened the lifespans of the generation of slaveholders that experienced the shock albeit these effects are

Abstract not available

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

We detail a methodology for estimating the textual similarity between two documents while accounting for the possibility that two different words can have a similar meaning. We illustrate the method’s usefulness in facilitating comparisons between documents with very different formats and vocabularies by textually linking occupation task and industry output descriptions with related technologies as

What was the impact of military conflict on economic inequality? I argue that ordinary military conflicts increased local economic inequality. Warfare raised the financial needs of communities in preindustrial times, leading to more resource extraction from the population. This resource extraction happened via inequality-promoting channels, such as regressive taxation. Only in truly major wars might

This study revisits the trade and welfare effects of 19th century bilateralism exploiting the latest developments in structural gravity models, including the consideration of domestic trade. Using bilateral trade data between 1855 and 1875, I show that the Cobden-Chevalier network, i.e. a system of bilateral trade agreements including the Most Favored Nation clause, has large, positive and significant

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

Abstract not available

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

War necessitates both allocating real resources to defense and certain interest groups being in favor of the government raising resources to wage war. Price controls can be a tool for governments to mobilize additional resources while buying the support of certain key interest groups, hence making war politically viable. France during the revolutionary Terror, the first instance of widespread price

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

Historical city directories are rich sources of micro-geographic data. They provide information on the location of households and firms and their occupations and industries, respectively. We develop a generic algorithmic work flow that converts scans of them into geo- and status-referenced household-level data sets. Applying the work flow to our case study, the Berlin 1880 directory, adds idiosyncratic

Researchers use microdata to study the economic development of the United States and the causal effects of historical policies. Much of this research focuses on county- and state-level patterns and policies because comprehensive sub-county data is not consistently available. We describe a new method that geocodes and standardizes the towns and cities of residence for individuals and households in decennial

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

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

How have health and social mortality risks changed over time? Evidence from pre-1945 cohorts is sparse, mostly from the United States, and evidence is mixed on long-term changes in the risk of being overweight. We develop a dataset of men entering the NZ army in the two world wars, with objectively measured height and weight, and socioeconomic status in early adulthood. Our sample includes significant

Persecution, pogroms, and genocide have plagued humanity for centuries, costing millions of lives and haunting survivors. Economists and economic historians have recently made new contributions to the understanding of these phenomena. We provide a novel conceptual framework which highlights the inter-relationship between the intensity of persecution and migration patterns across dozens of historical

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

We describe a deep learning method to read hand-written records from the 16th century. The method consists of a combination of a segmentation module and a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) module. The transformer-based HTR module exploits both language and image features in reading, classifying and extracting the position of each word on the page. The method is demonstrated on a unique historical

We develop a methodology for converting card index archival records into usable data frames for statistical and textual analyses. Leveraging machine learning and natural-language processing tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS), we overcome hurdles associated with character recognition, inconsistent data reporting, column misalignment, and irregular naming. In this article, we detail the step-by-step

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

Abstract not available

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

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? At first glance, with its rising levels of population and per capita income, it seems Russia was in a transition away from Malthusian equilibrium. However, the joint increase in population and per capita income could also have been the result of Russia’s high land-to-labor ratio. Which of the two is it? Such a problem is a frequent one in economic

I study the rates of, selection into, and sorting of European immigrants’ secondary migration within the United States and their geographic assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration. These phenomena are recognized as important components of the economics of immigration, but data constraints have limited prior study of them in this context. As part of the debate over immigrant distribution, they

Abstract not available

This paper presents a history of aggregate demand and supply shocks spanning 1900 – 2016 for the United Kingdom. Sign restrictions derived from a workhorse Keynesian model are used to identify the signs of those shocks. We compare the 30 largest shocks implied by a vector autoregressive model in unemployment and inflation with the narrative historical record. Our approach provides a new perspective

This article tests the influential democratic advantage hypothesis – that democratic governments have historically borrowed more cheaply than autocratic governments – in the context of the first financial globalization, from circa 1870 to 1913. We construct indicators of political regime types, then regress government bond spreads of 27 independent capital-importing countries on them. In contrast with

We examine a tumultuous period in Scottish history beginning from the Reformation in 1560 until a few years after the Revolution of 1688. During this period, the Crown repeatedly provoked political crises by attempting to impose an episcopal structure on the Church of Scotland. Using time series data of witch accusations, we find that the Scottish Presbyterians were substantially more active in persecuting

We study how political institutions affected the decision of countries to adhere to the classical gold standard. Using a variety of econometric techniques and controlling for a wide range of relevant economic and political factors, we find that the probability of adherence to the gold standard before World War I was ceteris paribus lower for countries which were more democratic. This effect can be

The Malthusian model is the subject of a fierce debate within economic history. Although the positive causal relationship postulated from living standards to population growth is relatively uncontroversial for preindustrial societies, this cannot be said for the other key relationship, diminishing returns due to fixed supplies of land. We argue that Denmark, which was characterized by extreme resource

This paper analyzes the determinants of providing financial support to revolutionaries, using a hand-compiled dataset of 17,000 donations to the Irish National Aid Association after the Easter Rising of 1916. Financial support is best predicted by literacy, marital status, religious affiliation, and relatively high socio-economic status. In this sense, donations to revolutionaries share some characteristics

A recent re-evaluation of patenting during the British Industrial Revolution argues patentees were responsive to demand-side conditions. This view does not consider supply-side factors, such as a patentee’s skill or access to financial resources, as an alternative mechanism. I exploit a rich dataset of patentee occupations to investigate the role a patentee’s economic or social background played in

In April 1933, eight months prior to the end of Prohibition, states within the US gained the ability to legalize 3.2 percent alcohol beer. Proponents of legalization predicted that the brewer's dray would bring jobs along with beer. We estimate that legalization brought around 81,000 jobs between April and June of 1933, 60,000 of which were created in April, when the nation emerged from the trough

Early modern warfare in Western Europe exposed civilian populations to violence, hardship, and disease. Despite limited empirical evidence, the ensuing mortality effects are regularly invoked by economic historians to explain patterns of economic development. Using newly collected data on adult burials and war events in the seventeenth-century Low Countries, we estimate early modern war-driven mortality

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

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

The British banking sector had many small banks in the mid-nineteenth century. From around 1885 until the end of World War One there was a process of increasingly larger mergers between banks. By the end of the merger wave the English and Welsh market was highly concentrated, with only five major banks. News of a merger brought a persistent rise in the share prices of both the acquiring and the target

This paper tests if a strong labor movement leads to fewer industrial conflicts. The focus is on Sweden between the first general election in 1919 and the famous Saltsjöbaden Agreement in 1938, a formative period when the country transitioned from fierce labor conflicts to a state of industrial peace. We use panel data techniques to analyze more than 2000 strikes in 103 Swedish towns. We find that

The complexity of a country's product mix is related to its economic growth. This paper extends this key insight from the economic growth literature to the second half of the 19th century, by reconstructing Revealed Comparative Advantages (RCA) and Economic Complexity Indices (ECI) for tens of polities, including both independent countries and colonies. It does so by exploiting product-polity information

The distinction between macro- and microinventions is at the core of recent debates on the Industrial Revolution. Yet, the empirical testing of this notion has remained elusive. We address this issue by introducing a new quality indicator for all patents granted in England in the period 1700–1850. The indicator provides the opportunity for a large-scale empirical appraisal of macro- and microinventions

We investigate books as an indicator of human capital using extraordinary, individual-level data on book ownership and signature literacy for a population of German women and men between 1610 and 1900. Although book ownership was very high from an early date, it was associated with signature literacy, gender, urbanization, and wealth in ways inconsistent with its having registered economically relevant

Recent studies suggest that Muslim military conquest (632–1100 CE) generated an institutional equilibrium with deleterious long-run political economy effects. This equilibrium was predicated on mamluk institutions: the use of elite slave soldiers (mamluks) and non-hereditary property rights over agricultural lands to compensate them (iqta). This paper evaluates this historical narrative by exploring

What are the benefits of moving from intermittent water delivery (which limits user access to less than 24 h per day) to constant service? To address this question, we study the transition from intermittent to constant water supply in London. Between 1871 and 1910, the proportion of London households with access to a constant water supply (24 h a day, 7 days a week) rose from less than 20–100 percent

How did the Spanish money supply evolve in the aftermath of the discovery of large amounts of precious metals in Spanish America? We synthesize the available data on the mining of precious metals and their international flow to estimate the money supply for Spain from 1492 to 1810. Our estimate suggests that the Spanish money supply increased more than ten-fold. Viewed through the equation of exchange

Estimated labor force participation rates among free women in the pre-Civil War period were exceedingly low. This is due, in part, to cultural or societal expectations of the role of women and the lack of thorough enumeration by Census takers. This paper develops an augmented labor force participation rate for free women in 1860 and compares it with the augmented rate for 1920 and today. Our methodology

This paper contributes to a growing literature on long-term trends and drivers of pre-industrial inequality by providing new stylized facts on the evolution of income inequality in Ghana from 1891 to 1960. Using newly constructed social tables, we estimate the Gini coefficient for seven consecutive decades at a time in which the adoption and expansion of cocoa cultivation transformed the Ghanaian economy

It has often been observed that the emergence of states in a region is typically preceded by an earlier transition to agricultural production. Using new data on the date of first state emergence within contemporary countries, we present a global scale analysis of the chronological relationship between the transition to agriculture and the subsequent emergence of states. We find statistically significant

The first mass migration of Mexicans to the United States occurred in the early twentieth century: from smaller pre-Revolutionary flows in the 1900s, to hundreds of thousands during the violent 1910s, to the boom of the 1920s, and then the bust and deportations/repatriations of the 1930s. Using a new linked sample of males, we find that the average Mexican immigrant held a lower percentile rank, based

This paper examines knowledge spillovers across ethnic boundaries. Using the case of skilled German immigrants in the Russian Empire, we study technology adoption among Russian peasants. We find that distance to German settlements predicts the prevalence of heavy iron ploughs, fanning mills and wheat sowing among Russians, who traditionally ploughed with a light wooden ard and sowed rye. The main channel

This article studies housing rents in St. Petersburg from 1880 to 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. Digitizing over 5000 rental advertisements, we construct a state-of-the-art index – the first pre-war and pre-Soviet market data index for any Russian city. In 1915, a rent control and tenant protection policy was introduced in response to soaring prices following the outbreak

A key challenge for research on many questions in the social sciences is that it is difficult to link records in a way that allows investigators to observe people at different points in their life or across generations. In this paper, we contribute to recent efforts to create these links with a new approach that relies on millions of record links created by individual contributors to a large, public

When the enslaved were emancipated across the British Empire in 1834, slave-owners received cash compensation, and four years of unpaid labour as the former slaves became apprentices. In the Cape Colony, appraisers assigned a value to the former slaves. To investigate this, we transcribed 37,411 valuation records to compile a novel emancipation dataset. This gives us a new picture of the enslaved population