Financing Innovation: The Role of Patent Examination
Abstract: We examine how the design of the patent system shapes firms’ access to finance. We exploit a UK reform that introduced substantive examination into the patent application process, improving the quality of information available to investors about the value of firms’ innovation. Using a newly compiled dataset of officially listed corporations, we find that […]
Why are corporations terminated? A century of evidence from the Netherlands
Abstract: We identify all 196 Dutch exchange-listed corporations that halted their operations and ceased to exist between 1903 and 1996. We then explain these terminations using unique hand-collected accounting and governance data and regression techniques suited to long-run comparative analysis. Although Dutch bankruptcy laws remained unchanged across the twentieth century, patterns of corporate exit shifted […]
The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Captains of Industry
The CEOs of Britain’s largest companies wield immense power, but we know very little about them. How did they get to the top? Why do they have so much power? Are they really worth that exorbitant salary? Michael Aldous and John Turner provide the answers by telling the story of the British CEO over the […]
The Short- and Long-Run Effects of Affirmative Action: Evidence from Imperial China
Abstract: We study the short- and long-term effects of affirmative action policies in the context of China. During imperial China, official positions were awarded to the most academically talented individuals through a multi-stage examination process administered by the central government. In 1712, a reform was implemented to address disparities in exam performance, aiming to equalize […]
Patently Peculiar: Patents and Innovation in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands
Abstract: We examine the accessibility and functioning of the patent system in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, a state that existed between 1815 and 1830. The country’s patent law combined an examination process with significant government discretion over a patent’s duration and cost. Using our hand-collected database of all patent applications—granted, withdrawn, and rejected—we […]
Applying History to Inform Anticipatory AI Governance: Using Foresight and Hindsight to Inform Policymaking
Summary: Artificial intelligence (AI) heralds societal changes that could rival those associated with past transformational general-purpose technologies, such as metallurgy, the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. As with such technologies, AI offers the opportunity for tremendous increases in human well-being while also threatening to destabilize social, governance, economic, and critical infrastructure systems and disempower […]
Dividend Policy: An Empirical Analysis for Imperial Germany
Abstract: In the German Empire, corporations almost always paid a dividend to their shareholders. Dividends have been cut or increased in line with the development of profits. We demonstrate that the target dividend and the average dividend tended to be nearly the same. If the dividend paid deviated from the target, we measure an extraordinarily […]
Rural electrification and secondary school enrolments in Ireland
Abstract: Electrification influences economic choices, not least by allowing households to replace labour with capital and to enhance domestic labour productivity. We test whether newly electrified households invested more in children’s human capital formation, proxied by secondary school enrolments, under Ireland’s Rural Electrification Scheme (1947-1966). IV panel regressions examine whether electrification led to higher per […]
Scarring and Selection in the Great Irish Famine
Summary: We study the health impact of the Great Irish Famine by comparing cohorts born during the Famine with those born immediately before and immediately after. We find evidence of selection in the countryside and scarring in the city. Abstract: How do famines shape the health of survivors? We examine the long-term impact of the […]
Decoding Trump’s trade strategy: The historical pattern beneath the headlines
U.S. President Donald Trump loves throwing opponents off balance. This unpredictability makes foretelling his administration’s policy priorities all the harder. Nowhere is this more evident than in trade policy. Three distinct interpretations have emerged: the Bluff Thesis, the Reckless Driver Theory and the Geopolitical Realignment Strategy. Read more here: Globe and Mail.
Religion and Economic Development: Past, Present, and Future
Abstract: This chapter examines the role of religion in economic development, both historically and today. Religion’s influence varies globally, with high religiosity in countries like Pakistan and low rates in China. Despite declines in some Western countries, religion remains influential worldwide, with projected growth in Muslim populations due to higher fertility rates. Religion continues to […]
Age structure and age heaping: solving Ireland’s post-famine digit preference puzzle
Abstract: The quality of age reporting in Ireland worsened in the years after the 1845–1852 Great Irish Famine, even as measures of educational attainment improved. We show how Ireland’s age structure partly accounts for this seemingly conflicting pattern. Specifically, we argue that a greater propensity to emigrate typified the youngest segment (23–32-year-olds) used in conventional […]
Of the bovine ilk: quantifying the welfare of dairy cattle in history, 1750–1900
Abstract: The costs, benefits, and ethical considerations regarding animal welfare are a central element in modern capitalist agriculture, yet systematic quantitative historical insights are lacking. To overcome this, we seek to understand animal welfare in the Danish dairy sector from 1750 to 1900, a period marked by significant agricultural development and industrialization. By applying contemporary […]
Taking a Punt: Monetary Experimentation and the Irish Macroeconomic Crisis of 1955-56
Abstract: The 1955-56 macroeconomic crisis is a central event in modern Irish history. Yet, despite this centrality, its causes are not clearly understood. In 1955-6, Ireland, which had previously followed British interest rates in lockstep as part of its fixed exchange with the latter, briefly experimented with independent monetary policy. Our contribution is twofold. First, […]
Precolonial Elites and Colonial Redistribution of Political Power
Abstract: Studies of colonialism often associate indirect colonial rule with continuity of the precolonial institutions. Yet, we know less about how colonialism affected the distribution of power between precolonial domestic elites within nominally continuous institutions. We argue that colonial authorities will redistribute power toward elites that are the most congruent with the colonizer’s objectives. We […]
Women’s Employment in the United States After the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
Abstract: Lasting changes in women’s employment followed the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States. In the decades before the pandemic, consistently fewer women reported an occupation in cities that would go on to have longer interventions targeted at curbing influenza. This gap narrowed after the pandemic, and by 1930 cities with longer interventions experienced […]
The Empire project: Trade policy in interwar Canada
Abstract: This paper uses a new dataset on the universe of Canadian imports and tariffs between 1924 and 1936, disaggregated into 1697 goods originating in 112 countries, to analyse the impact on Canadian imports of interwar Canadian trade policy, including the 1932 Ottawa trade agreements. Rather than use a dummy variable approach, we compute the […]
Zombie International Currency: The Pound Sterling 1945–1971
Abstract: This paper examines the international role of sterling during the Bretton Woods era and argues that it was not a competitor to the U.S. dollar. I construct a novel dataset to measure the reserve role of sterling in Europe and sterling area countries. The postwar reserve role of sterling was limited to the sterling […]
From Pensions To Pupils? Schooling, Resource Constraints And Old Age Pensions In Ireland 1901-11
Abstract: A large literature argues that resource constraints inhibit human capital accumulation. We test this hypothesis using the introduction of the Old Age Pension in Ireland in 1908, evaluating its spillover on school enrolments within multigenerational households. Exploiting the OAP’s age-based and means-test criteria, we identify the causal effect of the cash transfer on enrolments […]
Forced Migration and Local Economic Development: Evidence from Postwar Hungary
Abstract: We investigate the effects of forced migration on sending economies using the post-WW2 expulsion of German minorities from Hungary as a natural experiment. We combine historical and contemporary data sources to show that the forced migrations led to lasting reductions in economic activity. Plausible mechanisms driving this result appear to be sectoral change (shift […]
Reversing fortunes of German regions, 1926–2019: Boon and bane of early industrialization?
Abstract: This paper shows that nineteenth-century industrialization is an essential determinant of the pronounced changes in economic prosperity across German regions over the last 100 years. Using novel data on economic activity in 163 labor market regions in West Germany, we find that nearly half of them experienced a reversal of fortune, moving from the […]
Housing Prices, Costs, And Policy: The Housing Supply Equation In Ireland Since 1970
Abstract: This article examines the responsiveness of new housing supply to prices and costs, using the case of Ireland at quarterly frequency from the 1970s, as well as a county-level panel from the 1990s. Across four error-correction specifications, and supported by an instrumental variables approach, we find the estimated elasticity of new housing supply to […]
The rise and fall of urban concentration in Britain: Zipf, Gibrat and Gini across two centuries
Abstract: City size and growth are the subject of a substantial literature in economic geography and urban economics, but consensus remains elusive on the extent to which key regularities such as Zipf’s Law or Gibrat’s Law holds across space and time. We contribute to this literature by examining city size, rank and growth in Britain […]
Income Mobility before Industrialization: Evidence from South Africa’s Cape Colony
Abstract: Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip […]
Rally ’Round the Mask: Congressional Social Media Images and Masking during COVID-19
Abstract: During national crises, political elites often rally around the flag, promoting a central message to restore unity and calm the public. COVID-19 provided such a crisis. But did elites rally? The pandemic occurred at a point of extreme polarization in the United States, which threatens the potential for a rally. In this article, we […]
Early modern globalization and the extent of indigenous agency: Trade, commodities and ecology
Abstract: This paper examines the responses of Indigenous nations and European companies to new trading opportunities: the Cree nations with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and the Khoe nations with the Dutch East India Company [Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)]. This case study is important because of the disparate outcomes. Within a few decades the Cree […]
Mind Your Language: Explaining the Retreat of the Irish Language Frontier
Abstract: Why do we choose one language over another? Rival views see language frontiers as exogenous, driven by policy, or endogenous, determined by social, cultural and economic forces. We study language loss in nineteenth-century Ireland’s bilingual society using individual-level data from the 1901 census. Our analysis highlights the intergenerational influence of the education received by […]
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