Welcome to our archive of working papers, articles and monographs written by CEPH members.
This collection encompasses an array of themes and represents the cutting edge of the economic history discipline.
Submit content for consideration to ceph@tcd.ie.
Abstract: This paper argues that in all societies there is considerable agreement about what goods and services are needed to provide a decent living, and
Summary:In Victorian Britain, hundreds of companies and countless private investors supported railway construction; today, such infrastructure is only financed by the government. Comparing delivery of
Abstract: Enterprise creation, destruction and evolution support the transition to modern economic growth, yet these processes are poorly understood in industrialising contexts. We investigate Imperial
Abstract: As articulated by Adam Smith, one of the central issues facing companies is that managers will not run the business in the interests of
Abstract: The history of industrial revolutions provides valuable insights into how patents and patenting systems influence innovation. It also reveals the extent to which inventors
Abstract: What are the insights from historical pandemics for policymaking today? We carry out a systematic review of the literature on the impact of pandemics
Abstract: 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
Abstract: How does housing policy influence the long-run distribution of population? We examine the impact on long-term population dynamics of the world’s first large-scale rural
Abstract: Railways were an important driver of global economic growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While their role is well documented in industrial
Abstract: We explore the role of elites for development and the spread of industrialized dairying in Denmark in the 1880s. We demonstrate that the location
Abstract: 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
Abstract: We introduce a new database of historical Genuine Savings (GS), an indicator of sustainable development promoted by the World Bank and widely used in
Summary: Nationalists think about the economy, Marvin Suesse argues, and this thinking matters once nationalists hold political power. Many nationalists seek to limit global exchange,
Abstract: Alfred Marshall argued that the malaise of public companies in Edwardian Britain was due to the separation of ownership from control and a lack
Abstract: Fears of immigrants as a threat to public health have a long and sordid history. At the turn of the 20th century, when immigrants
Abstract: What is the role of access to land for the decision to emigrate? We consider the case of Denmark between 1868 and 1908, when
Abstract: This article explores the financing of early industrial corporations using newly constructed panel data from Imperial Russian balance sheets. We document how corporate capital
Abstract: Did the outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influence technical change during the Industrial Revolution? We address this question by investigating an
Abstract: New hand-collected school administrative data from 1870s Virginia, alongside linked individual US Census records, reveals that temporary school closures had lasting effects on literacy
Abstract: I investigate the effects of trade on labor coercion under the dual-coercive institutions of slavery and state coercion. Employing novel data from Egypt, I document
Abstract: This paper constructs a new chronology of the business cycle in the United Kingdom from 1700 on an annual basis and from 1920 on
Abstract: Ireland developed one of the world’s most intensive railroad networks in the second half of the 19th century. However, the emergence of railroads occurred
Abstract: Why did shareholder liability disappear? We address this question by looking at its use by British insurance companies from 1830 until its complete disappearance
Abstract: This article explores the effects of gender inequality and women’s disempowerment in the context of historical coalmining. Across the United States and Europe, ex-coalmining
Abstract: The quality of age reporting in Ireland worsened in the years after the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852), even as other measures of educational attainment
Abstract: What effect does political instability in the form of a potential secession from a political union have on business formation? Using newly collected data
Abstract: We assemble the Irish industrial data currently available for the years 1800–1921, the period during which the entire island was in a political union
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