The Routledge Handbook of Modern Economic History aims to introduce readers to important approaches and findings of economic historians who study the modern world. Its short chapters reflect the most ...up-to-date research and are written by well-known economic historians who are authorities on their subjects.
Modern economic history blends two approaches - Cliometrics (which focuses on measuring economic variables and explicitly testing theories about the historical performance and development of the economy) and the New Institutional Economics (which focuses on how social, cultural, legal and organizational norms and rules shape economic outcomes and their evolution). Part 1 of the Handbook introduces these approaches and other important methodological issues for economic history.
The most fundamental shift in the economic history of the world began about two and a half centuries ago when eons of slow economic change and faltering economic growth gave way to sustained, rapid economic expansion. Part 2 examines this theme and the primary forces economic historians have linked to economic growth, stagnation and fluctuations - including technological change, entrepreneurship, competition, the biological environment, war, financial panics and business cycles.
Part 3 examines the evolution of broad sectors that typify a modern economy including agriculture, banking, transportation, health care, housing, and entertainment. It begins by examining an equally important "sector" of the economy which scholars have increasingly analyzed using economic tools - religion. Part 4 focuses on the work force and human outcomes including inequality, labor markets, unions, education, immigration, slavery, urbanization, and the evolving economic roles of women and African-Americans.
The text will be of great value to those taking economic history courses as well as a reference book useful to prof
Can a temporary economic shock to an important local industry influence long-run city population? To answer this question I study the large temporary shock to British cities caused by the U.S. Civil ...War (1861–1865), which reduced cotton supplies to Britain’s important cotton textile industry. I show that this event temporarily reduced the growth rate of cities specializing in cotton textile production, relative to other English cities, and led to a persistent change in the level of city population.
The American System of economic growth Goodfriend, Marvin; McDermott, John
Journal of economic growth (Boston, Mass.),
03/2021, Letnik:
26, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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The early history of industrialization in the United States—famously known as “The American System of Manufactures”—exhibited four key features: the substitution of specialized intermediate inputs ...for skilled work in assembling final goods, the freedom with which knowledge has long been shared in the United States, a learning technology that leverages existing mechanical know-how in human capital accumulation, and increasing returns to intermediate inputs in processing final goods. Our endogenous growth model embodies these components and utilizes historical time series data on labor force “operatives” and the Census of Manufactures to calibrate the model’s parameters. Our simulation closely matches the 1.88% average per capita product growth in the United States from 1860 to date. The simulation predicts that growth will peak in 1980 and ultimately converge to 1.31%—a growth slowdown rooted from the beginning in the economization of skilled labor inherent in the American System. By 2000, simulated per capita product is 2.21 times larger than a counterfactual in which the American System of manufactures never existed.
This paper combines panel data on monthly mortality rates of US states and daily temperature variables for over a century (1900-2004) to explore the regional evolution of the temperature-mortality ...relationship and documents two key findings. First, the impact of extreme heat on mortality is notably smaller in states that more frequently experience extreme heat. Second, the difference in the heat-mortality relationship between hot and cold states declined over 1900-2004, though it persisted through 2004. Continuing differences in the mortality consequences of hot days suggests that health motivated adaptation to climate change may be slow and costly around the world.
The financial crisis has refocused attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the ...long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countries over the years 1870–2008. Total credit has increased strongly relative to output and money in the second half of the twentieth century. Monetary policy responses to financial crises have also been more aggressive, but the output costs of crises have remained large. Credit growth is a powerful predictor of financial crises, suggesting that policymakers ignore credit at their peril. JEL: E32, E44, E52, G01, N10, N20
•Technological diffusion can be understood as a broader process of societal embedding.•User contexts, cultural meanings, policies, and infrastructures can accelerate and stabilize new ...technologies.•We explore case studies of automobile diffusion in the United States and the Netherlands.•Applied to electric vehicles, societal embedding demands a more robust treatment of policy and agency.
Technological diffusion can be understood as a broader process of co-construction of technology and its environment. This article conceptualizes this co-construction as a process of societal embedding, in which new technologies find their place in wider societal domains, which include immediate user contexts, cultural meanings, policies, and infrastructures. This perspective helps address three under-developed dimensions in adoption models: (1) diffusion includes more actors than users/adopters, (2) user characteristics and environments are not known in advance, but are articulated during the technological diffusion process, and (3) societal embedding is full of choices and struggles that affect the directionality and thus shape of socio-technical systems. Societal embedding therefore calls importance to the “demand side” of sustainability transitions. Because electric vehicles have, so far, only achieved limited diffusion globally, we cannot use it to test and illustrate our framework. We therefore use a historical comparative research design, which utilizes the societal embedding framework with two case studies of automobile diffusion in the United States and the Netherlands between the 1880s and 1970s. We subsequently apply the resulting lessons and insights to the future development of electric vehicles, with examples from multiple countries. An important finding is that the successful diffusion of electric vehicles demands a more robust co-construction policy focus that includes tinkering with all aspects of the societal embedding process, and one involving a constellation of agents beyond policymakers and purchasers.
This paper uses a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of temporary trade protection on long-term economic development. I find that regions in the French Empire which became better ...protected from trade with the British for exogenous reasons during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) increased capacity in mechanized cotton spinning to a larger extent than regions which remained more exposed to trade. In the long run, regions with exogenously higher spinning capacity had higher activity in mechanized cotton spinning. They also had higher value added per capita in industry up to the second half of the nineteenth century, but not later.
The United States has long been perceived as a land of opportunity for immigrants. Yet, both in the past and today, US natives have expressed concern that immigrants fail to integrate into US society ...and lower wages for existing workers. This paper reviews the literatures on historical and contemporary migrant flows, yielding new insights on migrant selection, assimilation of immigrants into US economy and society, and the effect of immigration on the labor market.
This paper examines the relationship between US crude oil and stock market prices, using a Markov-Switching vector error-correction model and a monthly data set from 1859 to 2013. The sample covers ...the entire modern era of the petroleum industry, which typically begins with the first drilled oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1858. We estimate a two-regime model that divides the sample into high- and low-volatility regimes based on the variance–covariance matrix of the oil and stock prices. We find that the high-volatility regime more frequently exists prior to the Great Depression and after the 1973 oil price shock caused by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The low-volatility regime occurs more frequently when the oil markets fell largely under the control of the major international oil companies from the end of the Great Depression to the first oil price shock in 1973. Using the National Bureau of Economic research business cycle dates, we also find that the high-volatility regime more likely occurs when the economy experiences a recession.
•Examines the relationship between US crude oil and stock market prices•Estimate two-regime Markov switching model with high- and low-volatility regimes•High-volatility regime more likely before Great Depression and after 1973 oil shock•Low-volatility regime more likely between Great Depression to 1973 oil shock•High-volatility regime more likely when economy in a recession
This article attempts to document and account for the long-run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20—25% of national income ...between 1820 and 1910, down to less than 5% in 1950, and back up to about 15% by 2010. A simple theoretical model of wealth accumulation, growth, and inheritance can fully account for the observed U-shaped pattern and levels. Using this model, we find that under plausible assumptions the annual bequest flow might reach about 20—25% of national income by 2050. This corresponds to a capitalized bequest share in total wealth accumulation well above 100%. Our findings illustrate the fact that when the growth rate g is small, and when the rate of return to private wealth r is permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate (say, r = 4—5% versus g = 1—2%), which was the case in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century and is likely to happen again in the twenty-first century, then past wealth and inheritance are bound to play a key role for aggregate wealth accumulation and the structure of lifetime inequality. Contrary to a widespread view, modern economic growth did not kill inheritance.
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