This research advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the prehistoric exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance to various settlements ...across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had a persistent hump-shaped effect on comparative economic development, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity. While the low diversity of Native American populations and the high diversity of African populations have been detrimental for the development of these regions, the intermediate levels of diversity associated with European and Asian populations have been conducive for development.
The Gun-Slave Hypothesis is the long-standing idea that European gunpowder technology played a key role in growing the transatlantic slave trade. I combine annual data from the Transatlantic Slave ...Trade Database and the Anglo–African Trade Statistics to estimate a Vector Error Correction Model of the 18th century British slave trade that captures four versions of the Gun-Slave Hypothesis: guns-for-slaves-in-exchange, guns-for-slaves-in-production, slaves-for-guns-derived and the gun-slave cycle. Three econometric results emerge. (1) Gunpowder imports and slave exports were co-integrated in a long-run equilibrium relationship. (2) Positive deviations from equilibrium gunpowder “produced” additional slave exports. This guns-for-slaves-in-production result survives 17 placebo tests that replace gunpowder with non-lethal commodities imports. It is also confirmed by an instrumental variables estimation that uses excess capacity in the British gunpowder industry as an instrument for gunpowder. (3) Additional slave exports attracted additional gunpowder imports for 2–3 more years. Together these dynamics formed a gun-slave cycle. Impulse-response functions generate large increases in slave export in response to increases in gunpowder imports. I use these results to explain the growth of slave exports along the Guinea Coast of Africa in the 18th century.
This paper investigates whether the real interest rate parity (RIRP) is valid during the three waves of globalizations that occurred in the last 150 years (1870–1914, 1944–1971, 1989 to the present). ...If any, these periods should favor RIRP, since globalization is a process where economies and financial markets become increasingly integrated into a global economic system. In contrast to the existing literature, we model the departures from RIRP as a long-term memory process and apply fractional integration methods on a sample of real interest rate differentials of seven developed countries: France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK across the three globalization waves paired against the USA. We compute impulse response functions (IRF) to gain further insight into the memory characteristics of the RIRP differential processes and provide half-life estimates. We find that deviations from RIRP are mean reverting, providing robust evidence of real interest rate convergence during the three globalization waves. We shed further light on financial and commodity market integration during the three globalization waves by assessing the memory properties of uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) and relative purchasing power parity (PPP) differential processes. We find that deviations from relative PPP and UIP are not always mean-reverting processes. RIRP, relative PPP, and UIP hold simultaneously only in 7 out of 21 cases; RIRP and UIP hold in 11 out of 21 cases; RIRP hold without the support of relative PPP and UIP in 3 out of 21 cases. Thus, the evidence in favor of real interest rate convergence appears to be driven more by UIP than relative PPP. All these results are, to the authors knowledge, new to the literature.
This paper examines the long-run economic consequences of Russian serfdom. Employing data on the intensity of labor coercion just prior to emancipation in 1861, we document that a 25 percentage point ...increase in historical serfdom (1 SD) reduces household expenditure today by up to 17%. We then provide evidence on the persistence of this relationship by studying city populations over the period 1800 to 2002. Exploring mechanisms, our findings suggest that less urban agglomeration and slower industrial development in areas with a greater degree of serfdom perpetuated the negative effects of forced labor before, during, and after the Soviet period.
This paper empirically investigates why, between 800 and 1800, the urban center of gravity moved from the Islamic world to Europe. Using a large new city-specific data set covering Europe, the Middle ...East, and North Africa, we unravel the role of geography and institutions in determining long-run city development in the two regions. We find that the main reasons for the Islamic world's stagnation and Europe's longterm success are specific to each region: any significant positive interaction between cities in the two regions hampered by their different main religious orientation. Together, the long-term consequences of a different choice of main transport mode (camel versus ship) and the development of forms of local participative government in Europe that made cities less dependent on the state explain why Europe's urban development eventually outpaced that in the Islamic world.
Natural disturbances are paramount in the development of ecosystems but may jeopardise the provision of forest ecosystem services. Climate change exacerbates this threat and favours interactions ...between disturbances. Our objective was thus to capture this dimension of multiple disturbances in forest economics through a literature review. We built a database that encompasses 101 English peer-reviewed articles published between 1916 and 2020. We looked at the relationships between six main natural hazards: fire, windstorm, drought, ice/snow, insects and pathogens/disease. Our results indicate that the most frequent pairs of hazards analysed together are “Wind-Insects” in Europe and “Fire-Insects” in North America. We show that most economic studies assume that natural hazards are independent of each other and could thus miss some of the effects of changing hazard regimes, contrary to ecology-oriented articles. Finally, we suggest creating bridges between the ecology and economics of forest disturbances in order to refine current models of each discipline with the tools provided by the other discipline, especially in the critical context of climate change.
The essay considers the claim that slavery played a leading role in the acceleration of US economic growth in the nineteenth century. Although popular among pro-slavery apologists, the proposition ...fails under rigorous historical scrutiny. The slave South discouraged immigration, underinvested in transportation infrastructure, and failed to educate the majority of its population. It is not even clear that the region produced more cotton than it would have under a counterfactual alternative settlement by free family farmers, on the free-state pattern. The grain of truth in recently popular narratives is that many northerners and business interests were complicit in the crime of slavery: routinely engaging in transactions with slaveholders, even promoting activities that facilitated slavery and the domestic slave trade. Complicity complicates simple historical moralism, but it is quite different from the notion that the prosperity of the nation as a whole derived from slavery in any fundamental way.
Abstract
This paper revisits the link between electrification and the rise in female labour force participation (LFP), and presents theoretical and empirical evidence showing that electrification ...triggered a rise in female LFP by increasing market opportunities for skilled women. I formalize my theory in an overlapping generations model and find that my mechanism explains one quarter of the rise in female LFP during the rollout of electricity in the U.S. (1880–1940), and matches the slow decline in female home production hours during this period. I then present micro-evidence supporting my theory using newly digitized data on the early electrification of the U.S.
We examine the relationship between human capital and energy consumption in the United Kingdom employing time series data dating back to the beginning of the sixteenth century. We first employ ...traditional parametric methods to examine the long-run effects. We find a negative relationship between total human capital and energy consumption in the long run, with an additional year of schooling reducing energy consumption in the range 4–9%, depending on the identification method. Given that such a long time series contains non-linearities and structural shifts in the data, we investigate the non-linear properties and find a long-run relationship between human capital and energy consumption. We also relax the functional form assumptions and utilise local linear non-parametric regression. The results show a time-varying non-parametric link between human capital and energy consumption, although, consistent with the linear long-run estimates, the relationship is negative.
•We study the link between human capital and energy consumption in the United Kingdom.•The data set dates back to the beginning of the sixteenth century.•Parametric results show that an additional year of schooling reduces energy consumption in the range 4–9% in the long run.•Non-parametric results also identify a negative time-varying link between human capital and energy consumption.
This article shows that democracy in Weimar Germany was eroded by the political legacy of WWI. Using novel data on WWI veterans and an election panel from 1893–1933, I find that former soldiers are ...associated with a sizeable, persistent, and momentous shift in political preferences from left to right. I provide suggestive evidence that war participation made veterans highly receptive to nationalism and Anti-Communism. This alienated them from leftwing parties and drove the majority toward the political right. Contrary to historical accounts, veterans’ shifts in political preferences cannot be explained by exposure to violence or other polarizing post-war events.
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