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Firm profitability and forced wage labour in Portuguese Africa: Evidence from the Sena Sugar Estates, 1920–74 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Sam Jones, Peter Gibbon
Forced wage labour (FWL) in colonial‐era Portuguese Africa came to encompass a majority of working age men and persisted until the early 1960s. On the basis of reconstructed financial records from the Sena Sugar Estates in today's Mozambique, we estimate the long‐run profitability of the firm. With this we associate rates of extraction from native labour, defined as the difference between actual levels
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Corporate taxes, leverage, and investment: Evidence from Nazi‐occupied Netherlands The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Philip T. Fliers, Abe de Jong, Bert S. van Stiphout‐Kramer
We examine the Netherlands around the Second World War, where the occupying Nazi regime overhauled the country's corporate tax regime and introduced a profit tax of 55 per cent. We estimate that the new tax regime cost investors at least 300 million guilders, an amount equivalent to 5 per cent of Dutch GDP in 1940. We demonstrate that the tax introduction changed the financing of Dutch businesses.
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Competition, over‐branching and bank failures during the Great Depression: New evidence from Italy The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Marco Molteni
This paper employs quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the link between banking competition, branching and financial distress during the interwar period in Europe, focusing on Italy as a case study. Regression analysis and a systematic review of printed sources show that banks experiencing distress had opened scores of branches and operated in areas with harsher competition. Poor managerial
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Bonds for the long run? The rate of return on corporate bonds in Belgium, 1838–1939 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Kevin Van Mencxel, Jan Annaert, Marc Deloof
We investigate corporate bond returns for the period 1838–1939 by compiling a unique new database of 201 000 monthly observations of bonds traded on the Brussels Stock Exchange. The value‐weighted annualized total rate of return, net of coupon defaults and taxes, is 4.35 per cent in nominal terms and 2.81 per cent in real terms. Estimates of average returns show that corporate bonds outperformed equities
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Art in times of crisis The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Géraldine David, Yuexin Li, Kim Oosterlinck, Luc Renneboog
We trace the long‐term performance of the UK art market across a broad set of crises: world wars, economic recessions, financial crises, inflationary periods, and changes in monetary policy. By means of digitalized historical auction archives, we construct art price indices from the early twentieth century onwards and disclose that annual art auction value grew, in real terms, more than seven‐fold
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Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800MaartenPrak and Jan LuitenvanZanden, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. pp. 280. ISBN 9780691229874. Hbk £30) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Jeroen Puttevils
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Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change By Stephen G.Gross, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023: pp. 408. ISBN: 9780197667712, Hbk £35). The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Frank Trentmann
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An Exchange Rate History of the United Kingdom: 1945–1992AlainNaef (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. pp. 200. ISBN 9781108839990. Hbk $110) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Wilfried Kisling
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An Economic History of the First German Unification: State Formation and Economic Development in a European Perspective.UlrichPfister & NikolausWolf (eds.), (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. pp. 390. 50 figs. ISBN 9781032254838. Hbk £120) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Marvin Suesse
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Swedish income inequality in 1613 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Martin Andersson, Jakob Molinder
In this paper we present the first estimate of the full income distribution in pre‐industrial Sweden (including present‐day Finland). We draw on the schedule and the individual assessments devised by the authorities to distribute the 1613 Älvsborg ransom taxation to estimate income inequality, as well as the income shares of the top quantiles and of various social groups. We find that Sweden was relatively
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Three centuries of corporate governance in the United Kingdom The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 John D. Turner
As articulated by Adam Smith, one of the central issues facing companies is that managers will not run the business in the interests of its owners and will misuse resources. This ultimately has a detrimental consequence for the wealth of the nation. This survey reviews the nature and evolution of the corporate governance of UK public companies over the past 300 years. It makes two principal arguments
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Gender and justice: The status of women in Ottoman courts The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Metin M. Coşgel, Hamdi Genç, Emre Özer, Sadullah Yıldırım
This paper studies legal disparities between men and women in a patriarchal framework. Throughout history, women have confronted discrimination in matters of inheritance, property ownership, and various other legal rights. We examine the consequences of legal discrimination for women's differential engagement and success within legal conflicts, using data from Ottoman courts in the early nineteenth
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The Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East: A survey and speculation article for the Economic History Review The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Robert C. Allen
This paper investigates the causes and the consequences of the emergence of agriculture in the Middle East. Agriculture has emerged in many parts of the world since the end of the last Ice Age about 15 000 years ago. The paper first surveys the Palaeolithic Period to understand why agriculture did not emerge earlier. Then the paper considers the processes that led to the emergence of agriculture in
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The 1929 crash of the New York stock exchange as a liquidity crisis The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Jean-Laurent Cadorel
What caused the 1929 crash of the New York Stock Exchange? This paper quantitatively studies liquidity during the 1929 crash of the NYSE. I evidence that the crash represented a liquidity crisis due to the liquidation of brokers’ margin loans. Applying recent estimators of effective spreads and liquidity conditions from contemporary finance literature suggests a four-fold increase in spreads during
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The last free traders? Interwar trade policy in the Netherlands and Netherlands East Indies The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-12-25 Pim de Zwart, Markus Lampe, Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke
There has still been too little detailed work on the protectionism that emerged in the wake of the Great Depression. In this paper we explore the experiences of two countries that have been largely neglected in the literature, the Netherlands and Netherlands East Indies (NEI). How did these traditionally free-trading economies respond to the Depression? We construct a detailed product-level database
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Rent–wage inequality in Mexico City, 1770–1930 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Amílcar E. Challú, Israel García Solares, Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato
This article traces trends of income inequality in Mexico City from 1770 to 1930 by measuring the gaps between urban real estate rents and unskilled wages. The article presents the first long-term series of real estate values and rental income for Mexico. One series summarizes the price of an apartment in tenement housing (the prevalent type of popular housing in Mexico), while the other relies on
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‘The same contract that is suitable for your Excellency’: Immigration and emulation in the adoption of sharecropping-cum-debt arrangements in Brazil (1835‒80) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Bruno Gabriel Witzel de Souza
This paper studies the history of contractual choice in coffee plantations of São Paulo, Brazil. It focuses on the consolidation of non-captive labour markets in the early phases of the transition from slavery in the country, particularly in the 1840s–50s. Vis-à-vis the alternatives of fixed rents and fixed payments per time worked or piece rates, the paper examines the rationale for the adoption of
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Shipping in the London coal trade, 1700‒1860 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Peter M. Solar, Oliver Buxton Dunn, Aidan Kane
Evidence from more than 40 000 voyages shows that labour productivity growth for sailing ships in the London coal trade was rapid but quite irregular between 1700 and 1860. These granular data permit us to examine various dimensions of change, showing that ships made more voyages per year, had smaller crews, carried more coal per ship ton and had longer working lives. Some changes resulted from what
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Income inequality and export-oriented commercialization in colonial Africa: Evidence from six countries The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Ellen Hillbom, Jutta Bolt, Michiel de Haas, Federico Tadei
Limited knowledge of African historical inequality trajectories hampers our understanding of inequality outcomes today and leads to a major omission in debates about global inequality. Economies in colonial Africa were characterized by a process of export-oriented commercialization. We hypothesize that this process itself, the capital intensity of the commodities produced, and the relative importance
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Aesthetics for a polite society: Language and the marketing of second-hand goods in eighteenth-century London The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Bruno Blondé, Alessandra de Mulder, Jon Stobart
The late early modern period witnessed critical consumer transitions across Europe. Yet, while the explosion of the material world and the transition from an ‘old luxury’ material culture to a ‘new luxury’ model is well documented, our understanding of the underlying value systems of consumer goods is still under-developed. Building on a database of eighteenth-century advertisements for household auctions
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‘A new way by her invented’: Women inventors and technological innovation in Britain, 1800–1930 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-11-05 B. Zorina Khan
What accounts for the common perception that women have contributed little to advances in entrepreneurship and innovation in Britain during the early industrial era? This paper empirically examines the role of gender diversity in inventive activity during the first and second industrial revolutions. The analysis of systematic data on patents and unpatentable innovations uniquely enables an evaluation
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Should history change the way we think about populism? The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-11-05 Alan de Bromhead, Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke
This paper asks whether history should change the way in which economists and economic historians think about populism. We use Müller's definition, according to which populism is ‘an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy’. We make three historical arguments. First, late-nineteenth-century US Populists were not populist. Second, there is no necessary relationship
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The demand for extraterritoriality: Religious minorities in nineteenth-century Egypt The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Cihan Artunç, Mohamed Saleh
The transplantation of European legal systems in the periphery often occurred via semi-colonial institutions, where Europeans were subject to their own jurisdictions that placed them outside the reach of local courts. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the option of extraterritoriality was extended to local non-Muslims. Drawing on Egypt's population censuses in 1848 and 1868, we show that locals did not
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The making of paper money in early modern Japan The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 John D'Amico
This article explores the conception and execution of paper currency schemes in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). Paper currency was widely used as a form of local money in early modern Japan, but has received close to no attention in Anglophone scholarship even amid a recent upsurge in interest in the global history of money. From the perspective of monetary history, Tokugawa paper currency presents an
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Driven by crises: Price integration on the grain market in late medieval Flanders The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Stef Espeel
At the centre of the debate on pre-industrial economic growth is the study of market integration, a topic that has increasingly been the focus of intense scientific interest in recent decades. However, this has remained limited to the early modern and modern periods, mainly due to the availability of relevant data. New grain price series have been constructed for several Flemish cities dating back
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Was there a ‘consumer revolution’ in the Ottoman Empire? The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Pınar Ceylan
Whether the ‘democratization’ of consumption during the early modern period was specifically a characteristic of the European economic shift or observable in other parts of the world remains a central question in understanding the early roots of consumerism, as well as explaining pre-industrial growth and divergence. However, the scarcity of quantitative evidence from the non-Western world limits our
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From circular to permanent: The economic assimilation of migrants during Spain's rural exodus, 1955–73 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 José Antonio García-Barrero
Circular migration has played a substantial role in the assimilation process of rural–urban migrants in Spain across the twentieth century. This paper analyses the short-term impact of the temporariness of this type of migration in the economic assimilation of migrants during the rural exodus, 1955–73. More specifically, I study this process in one key scenario – the Spanish tourism boom. Using a novel
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Technical change and the postwar slowdown in Soviet economic growth in a long run perspective, 1885–2019 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Leonard Kukić
The existing studies usually find that technical change was very important in constraining the economic growth of the Soviet Union. While these studies have been successful in quantifying the extent of technical change, they have been less successful in quantifying its nature. This paper moves a step closer to probing the essence of Soviet efficiency by splitting the aggregate technical change into
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Goodbye, Mr. Portugal: Fiscal crisis, constitutional revolution, and the independence of Brazil (1808–22) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-09-23 Rafael Cariello, Thales Zamberlan Pereira
This article provides a new interpretation of Brazil's independence that relates the process of political emancipation to the Portuguese empire's fiscal crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We discuss the origins and impact of the fiscal crisis that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal in 1807 and the transfer of the government to Rio de Janeiro. Quantitative evidence shows that
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The legacy of voluntarism: Charitable funding in the early NHS The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-08-28 Bernard Harris, Rosemary Cresswell
Before 1948, approximately one-third of the United Kingdom (UK)’s hospital beds were located in voluntary hospitals, many of which continued to benefit from the funds generated by their historic endowments. When the National Health Service (NHS) was created, the vast majority of these hospitals were taken over by the State. This paper examines the neglected question of what happened to these endowments
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From a common empire to colonial rule: Commodity market disintegration in the Near East The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Laura Panza
This paper investigates the impact of the disruption of the Ottoman Empire on the integration of regional and colonial commodity markets in the Near East. Exploiting a novel dataset on commodity prices in Syria, Egypt, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom covering the 1787–1939 period, it assesses the extent of price dispersion across markets before and after the end of the Ottoman Empire and investigates
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International entrepreneurship without investor protection: Evidence from initial public offerings in Belgium before the First World War The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-08-18 Marc Deloof, Ine Paeleman
We investigate the financing and performance of international entrepreneurship in an environment that was characterized by severe information problems and very weak investor protection. Despite these problems, new ventures could raise large amounts of equity and debt on the Belgian capital market between 1890 and 1914. Many of these firms were international new ventures (INVs) with their main operations
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Numeracy selectivity of Spanish migrants in colonial America (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 María del Carmen Pérez-Artés
Since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so-called New World in 1492, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards settled in Central and South America. This paper assesses the skill selectivity of Spanish migrants who went to Hispanic America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries for the first time. The age-heaping method is employed to estimate numeracy levels as a proxy for human capital. With
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Hot money inflows and bank risk-taking: Germany from the 1920s to the Great Depression The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Natacha Postel-Vinay*, Stéphanie Collet
This paper explores the origins of German banks’ risk-taking in the years preceding the 1931 crisis. The 1920s were marked by a large and prolonged increase in capital flows into Germany, chiefly from the United States and the United Kingdom. This coincided, at the individual bank level, with a rise in leverage and a fall in liquidity. We examine possible connections between the two phenomena. Our
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Female relatives and domestic service in nineteenth-century England and Wales: Female kin servants revisited The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-22 Xuesheng You
This article uses the full sample of the 1851 census enumerators’ books (CEBs) to revisit and reanalyse the well-known phenomenon of female kin servants in the British census. We find that the recording of female kin servants points to three distinct possibilities – day servants, domestic work at relatives’ homes, and work at relatives’ homes as part of the family business unit. Accordingly, we argue
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Stocks and flows: Material culture and consumption behaviour in early modern Venice (c. 1650–1800) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Mattia Viale
This paper examines the evolution of consumption practices in Venice in the long eighteenth century through the combined use of post-mortem inventories and household budgets. Although Italy experienced a period of relative decline between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, our findings suggest that Venetian households enjoyed a rich and vibrant material culture that was fully comparable with
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Height and the disease environment of children: The association between mortality and height in the Netherlands 1850–1940 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Björn Quanjer
Height and infant mortality are both considered health indicators of a population, yet they tend to be much more strongly correlated in high-income, low-mortality populations. This article shows that infant deaths are not representative of the health of survivors as it relates to height because breastfeeding practices shield them from part of the disease environment. Instead, child mortality rates
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Can colonial institutions explain differences in labour returns? Evidence from rural colonial India The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Jordi Caum-Julio
This paper studies the relationship between land revenue systems and returns to agricultural labour in colonial India. I provide the first district-level comparative estimates of agricultural labour returns relative to average income, on the basis of wage/income ratios for 1916. I then use those estimates to analyse the impact of the land revenue systems established by the British colonial authorities
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‘No commercial activity leaves greater benefit’: The profitability of the Cuban-based slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-08 Jose Miguel Sanjuan-Marroquin, Martin Rodrigo-Alharilla
In this paper, we discuss the basis of the illegal slave trade between Africa and Cuba, measuring its volume and profit during the first half of the nineteenth century. Due to its illegal nature, the sources for exploring this trade were systematically destroyed, but we have been able to locate the accountancy of 17 expeditions that gives us a comprehensive understanding of the profits, margins, and
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Correction to ‘Early inventory management practices in the foreign exchange market: Insights from sixteenth-century Lyon’ The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-02
Matringe, N., ‘Early inventory management practices in the foreign exchange market: Insights from sixteenth-century Lyon’, Economic History Review, 75, (2022), pp. 739−778. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13112 In the above article, In Appendix II, graph (b) was incorrectly published on page 775. The correct graph (b) should read as follows: (b) Inventory rebalancing (three-party transaction) We apologize
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Between voluntarism and compulsion: Membership in mutual health insurance societies in Swedish manufacturing, c. 1900 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Maria Stanfors, Tobias Karlsson, Lars-Fredrik Andersson, Liselotte Eriksson
Membership in mutual health insurance societies spread among industrial workers in the late nineteenth century. We study determinants of such membership among male workers in Swedish manufacturing by using matched employer–employee data from three industries covering all workers (i.e. members and non-members, N > 12 000) and firms around 1900. We find remarkably high rates of membership overall, and
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A safe asset in early modern Castile, 1543–1714 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-05-27 Víctor M. Gómez-Blanco
This article shows how public offices in the early modern period became investment assets in Castile (Spain). Moreover, it demonstrates that offices fulfilled all the conditions for being viewed as safe assets. In particular, through the combination of qualitative sources with a novel hand-collected database, it shows that offices did not suffer from adverse selection, were traded in liquid secondary
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The contribution of enslaved workers to output and growth in the antebellum United States The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Mark Stelzner, Sven Beckert
Estimating the contribution of enslaved workers to output and growth in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century is a crucial building block to better understand the contours of nineteenth-century US economic history, and more generally, the connection between slavery and capitalism. Existing estimates only present a partial picture and are potentially problematic. In this
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The anatomy of a bubble company: The London Assurance in 1720 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Graeme Acheson, Michael Aldous, William Quinn
The London Assurance Company (LA), which incorporated during the bubble of 1720, experienced more dramatic price movements in its shares than the South Sea Company. This paper examines how incorporating during the bubble affected its long run performance. We show that the bubble in the Company's share price was partly attributable to changes in market structure during the share issuance process. As
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Missing girls in Liberal Italy, 1861–1921 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia, Gabriele Cappelli
By relying on the number of (surviving) boys per hundred girls observed in the population censuses as a cumulative measure of differential mortality during birth, infancy, and childhood, this paper shows that average Italian child sex ratios (aged 0–4) were abnormally high between 1861 and 1921. Our estimations indicate that unexplained excess female mortality resulted in around 2–3 per cent of ‘missing
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The United Kingdom's disappearing wartime imports 1939–45: A statistical, ideological, and historiographical accounting The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-05-01 David Edgerton
In this paper I show inter alia that, by one barely known but official measure, imports of goods into the United Kingdom towards the end of the Second World War were more than twice the best-known measure. The lower measure is that found in the historical British national accounts and in the Bank of England's A millennium of macroeconomic data. That invaluable compendium in fact has both these measures
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Fiscal policy under constraints: Fiscal capacity and austerity during the Great Depression The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Andrea Papadia
The Great Depression was characterized by widespread fiscal policy mistakes in the form of a contractionary or insufficiently expansionary fiscal stance. Despite this general conclusion, there were large differences in the conduct of fiscal policy between countries. I find that a higher degree of fiscal capacity helped countries run less procyclical fiscal policies by allowing them to borrow more extensively
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State of forgiveness: Cooperation, conciliation, and state formation in Mughal South Asia (1556–1707) The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Safya Morshed
This paper contributes to a growing literature on state capacity with reference to the early modern Asian empires. The historiography of these states, and especially the Mughal empire of South Asia, has moved away from an image of unrestrained despotism towards that of a constrained state, but has yet to explore fully what these constraints were and what the state did to overcome them. Using a new
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Legal origins of corporate governance: Choice of law in Egypt, 1887–1914 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-03-29 Cihan Artunç
This paper revisits the classic question of legal origins: whether laws originating from common or civil law traditions are more effective in promoting governance rules with stronger shareholder and investor protection. But corporate governance cannot be easily disentangled from other sources that can influence firm outcomes. This paper disentangles these effects by assembling a new dataset of corporations
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Household structure, labour participation, and economic inequality in Britain, 1937–61 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Ian Gazeley, Andrew Newell, Kevin Reynolds, Hector Rufrancos
We investigate household income/expenditure inequality using survey data for the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1961. Previous studies employed tax unit or wage rate data. Between 1937/8 and 1953/4, we find little change in inequality for incomes below the top 5 per cent or 10 per cent. This is consistent with the tax unit data. By 1961, inequality was notably higher than in 1953/4. Three trends might
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Social inequalities in famine mortality in the manorial system of the tsarist Russian province of Livland in the mid-1840s The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Kersti Lust, Martin Klesment, Hannaliis Jaadla
By relying on longitudinal data on two rural parishes in the Russian Baltic province of Livland, the article analyses two questions concerning famine's short-run effects on mortality in a manorial system: (1) whether there is evidence of a social gradient in mortality during the famine of 1844–6 and (2) whether the manors could protect the peasants against the hardships. The analysis reveals that neither
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Autarky in Franco's Spain: The costs of a closed economy The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Rodolfo G. Campos, Iliana Reggio, Jacopo Timini
Between the 1940s and 1970s, Spain used a variety of economic policies that hindered international trade. Because the mix of tariffs, quotas, administrative barriers, and exchange rate regimes varied greatly over time, the quantification of the effect of the various trade policies on international trade in this period is particularly elusive. In this paper, we use historical bilateral trade flows and
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The price of poverty: The association between childhood poverty and adult income and education in Sweden, 1947–2015 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Gabriel Brea-Martinez, Martin Dribe, Maria Stanfors
Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of being poor as an adult. We know relatively little about this persistence of poverty in the past and whether it changed as modern welfare societies developed. This study both analyses determinants of childhood poverty and assesses the association between childhood poverty and economic outcomes in adulthood for men and women who grew up in southern Sweden
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Supervision without regulation: Discount limits at the Austro–Hungarian Bank, 1909–13 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-01-29 Clemens Jobst, Kilian Rieder
We show that nineteenth century central banks could use credit limits for discount loans as a means to enforce supervisory standards long before they had any formal regulatory powers. Drawing on novel microdata from the Austro–Hungarian Bank's archives, we document that credit limits were continuously monitored and that their size was contingent on counterparties’ liquidity and capital position. Counterparties
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Status and mortality: Is there a Whitehall effect in the United States? The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-01-27 Tom Nicholas
The influential Whitehall studies found that top-ranking civil servants in Britain experienced lower mortality than civil servants below them in the organizational hierarchy due to differential exposure to workplace stress. I test for a Whitehall effect in the United States using a 1930 cohort of white-collar employees at a leading firm – General Electric (GE). All had access to a corporate health
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Dating business cycles in the United Kingdom, 1700–2010 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-01-27 Stephen Broadberry, Jagjit S. Chadha, Jason Lennard, Ryland Thomas
This paper constructs a new chronology of the business cycle in the United Kingdom from 1700 on an annual basis and from 1920 on a quarterly basis to 2010. The new chronology points to several observations about the business cycle. First, the cycle has significantly increased in duration and amplitude over time. Second, contractions have become less frequent but are as persistent and costly as at other
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The Middle-Eastern marriage pattern? Malthusian dynamics in nineteenth-century Egypt The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-01-22 Yuzuru Kumon, Mohamed Saleh
Malthus predicted that fertility rises with income and that people regulate fertility via regulating marriage. However, evidence on the Malthusian equilibrium has been mostly confined to Europe and East Asia. We employ Egypt's population censuses of 1848 and 1868 to provide the first evidence on the preindustrial Malthusian dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. At the aggregate level, we document
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Power politics and the expansion of US exports, 1879–1938 The Economic History Review (IF 2.487) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Antonio Tena-Junguito, Maria Isabel Restrepo-Estrada
In this article, we present quantitative evidence for the first time of the effect of US power politics on the expansion of its export market from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. Like other empires, US imperial policy was expressed through annexation, gunboat policies, and asymmetrical trade agreements. We find that US exports to territories that became colonies or protectorates