There are two striking aspects of the recovery from the Great Depression in the United States: the recovery was very weak, and real wages in several sectors rose significantly above trend. These data ...contrast sharply with neoclassical theory, which predicts a strong recovery with low real wages. We evaluate the contribution to the persistence of the Depression of New Deal cartelization policies designed to limit competition and increase labor bargaining power. We develop a model of the bargaining process between labor and firms that occurred with these policies and embed that model within a multisector dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that New Deal cartelization policies are an important factor in accounting for the failure of the economy to recover back to trend.
Abstract
This study provides evidence that strong kin networks are detrimental for democratic participatory institutions and that the medieval Catholic Church's marriage regulations dissolved ...Europe's clan-based kin networks, which contributed to the emergence of participatory institutions. I show that weak ancestral kin networks are positively associated with ethnicities’ democratic traditions in the past and countries’ democracy scores today. At the same time, medieval Church exposure predicts weak kin networks across countries, European regions and ethnicities. In a historical difference-in-difference analysis, I provide evidence that exposure to the Church contributed to the formation of medieval communes—self-governed cities with participatory institutions. Moreover, within Christian Europe, stricter regional and temporal marriage prohibitions are associated with commune formation. Lastly, I shed light on one mechanism, civicness, and show that weak kin networks are associated with more political participation.
This article argues that an embryonic futures market was present in Liverpool during the Anglo-American War. The analysis of a previously unseen data-set of printed Prices Currents has facilitated ...not only a price series of raw cotton prices, but an in-depth analysis of the 'construction' of those raw cotton prices. By positing a definition of an embryonic futures market and then analysing each of the features of a such a market in turn, this study demonstrates the existence of an embryonic futures market in early nineteenth-century Liverpool.
State history and economic development Borcan, Oana; Olsson, Ola; Putterman, Louis
Journal of economic growth (Boston, Mass.),
03/2018, Letnik:
23, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The presence of a state is one of the most reliable historical predictors of social and economic development. In this article, we complete the coding of an extant indicator of state presence from ...3500 BCE forward for almost all but the smallest countries of the world today. We outline a theoretical framework where accumulated state experience increases aggregate productivity in individual countries but where newer or relatively inexperienced states can reach a higher productivity maximum by learning from the experience of older states. The predicted pattern of comparative development is tested in an empirical analysis where we introduce our extended state history variable. Our key finding is that the current level of economic development across countries has a hump-shaped relationship with accumulated state history.
A long-standing item of interest in Canadian economic history is the “agricultural crisis” that apparently plagued the large colony of Quebec during the first half of the nineteenth century. One ...particularly resilient explanation of the crisis claims that cultural conservatism made the colony’s French-Canadian population reluctant to embrace modern farming techniques developed in Britain and the US. This has been supported through comparisons with the English farmers in the colony. Using data from the census of Quebec in 1851, this paper shows that there was no such reluctance. French-Canadian farmers were no less likely to adopt “scientific” farming techniques than English-Canadian farmers in the region.
This article studies the evolution of Swedish inheritance taxation since the late nineteenth century to its abolition in 2004. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, the annual effective ...inheritance tax rates are computed for different sizes of bequests and asset types, accounting for all relevant exemptions, deductions, and valuation discounts. Second, an attempt is made to explain changes in inheritance taxation over time. Ideology appears to be the main driver of the sharp tax increases of the 1930s to the 1960s. Wartime economies with higher pressures on the people induced politicians to raise inheritance taxes on the wealthy, primarily during the First World War. Increased opportunities for tax planning for the wealthy are also documented, most notably a series of tax cuts on inherited family firms in the 1970s. This rise in avoidance opportunities for the rich, while middle-class heirs faced growing inheritance tax rates, undermined the legitimacy of the tax and led to its repeal.
Spinning the industrial revolution Humphries, Jane; Schneider, Benjamin
The Economic history review,
February 2019, Letnik:
72, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's ‘high wage economy’ view, which claims that the ...high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high wage economy’ in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low‐productivity, low‐wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.
•The ARDL cointegration technique was applied for the Brazilian context in the very long-run (1822–2019).•We focus on three main determinants of Brazil's economic growth, namely human capital, ...structural change, and institutional quality.•The research provides policy suggestions for promoting economic growth in Brazil through human capital accumulation and industrialization.
A growing body of empirical literature has considered very long-time horizons when studying the sources of a country's economic growth. Nevertheless, the growth experiences of emerging economies (EEs) have been overlooked. This study examines to what extent human capital, structural change, and institutional quality contribute to the economic growth of one of the largest EEs in the world, Brazil, between 1822 and 2019. Resorting to the ARDL cointegration technique, the results suggest that years of schooling (human capital) have a positive and long-lasting impact on Brazil's economic growth. Moreover, there is solid evidence that sectoral changes toward more advanced and sophisticated manufacturing basis is growth-enhancing in the country. Finally, institutional quality does not constitute over the very long-run, a significant booster of Brazilian economic growth.
We propose that the “historically relevant” comparison of the Danish and Russian Empires from the early eighteenth century until the First World War presents a useful starting point for a promising ...research agenda. We justify the comparison by noting that the two empires enjoyed striking geographical, political and institutional similarities. Beyond this, we also demonstrate that the two empires were bound together by war, royal marriage, and migration. We suggest some examples of what might be investigated, with a particular focus on agriculture, due to its importance to both Danish and Russian economic history. Finally, we zoom in on the role Danish experts played for developing the Russian butter industry.
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