The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890–2006
Abstract: We construct the first annual market rent and home sales price series for American cities over the twentieth century using 2.7 million newspaper real estate listings. Our findings revise several stylized facts about U.S. housing markets. Real market rents did not fall during the postwar period in most cities and rose nationally by 60% […]
Transplanting Company Law: Shareholder Protection in the Cape Colony
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the transplantation of British company law into the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth century. The Cape Colony Companies Act of 1892 was like its British counterpart in that it provided minimal investor protection. This meant that promoters were free to choose the level and types of shareholder safeguards […]
Have We Under-Estimated Inflation Persistence Before WW1? US and International Evidence
Abstract: We argue that measurement error in historical price data has led researchers to erroneously believe that there was little persistence of inflation during the 19th century. Using a statistical technique that accounts for these errors, we estimate the persistence of (a) US inflation and (b) inflation in 14 other economies over the period 1842-1913. […]
The Aftermath of Sovereign Debt Crises: A Narrative Approach
Abstract: This paper investigates the causal effects of sovereign debt crises in a sample of 50 defaulting economies between 1870 and 2010. As default is potentially endogenous, we use the narrative approach to identify plausibly exogenous episodes. We find economically and statistically significant costs of up to 3.2 percent of GDP before recovering to the […]
Speculation in the UK, 1785-2019
Abstract: Speculation has long been thought to have significant economic effects, but it is difficult to measure, making it challenging to examine these effects empirically. In this paper we measure speculation in the UK since 1785 by using business and financial reporting in The Times newspaper. Our monthly speculation index reveals four distinct epochs of […]
Financing Late Industrialization: Evidence from the State Bank of the Russian Empire
Abstract: Gerschenkron (1962) argued that public institutions such as the State Bank of the Russian Empire spurred the country’s industrialization. We test this assertion by exploiting plant-level variation in access to State Bank branches using a unique geocoded factory data set. Employing an identification strategy based on geographical distances between banks and factories, our results […]
On the persistence of persistence: Lessons from long-term trends in African Institutions
Abstract: An influential strand of literature within economics and economic history called ‘persistence studies’ argues that low material living standards in African countries today were determined by institutional choices made in the past. However, the lack of consistent annual data on GDP per capita or institutional variables has meant that this literature has been largely […]
Life, death, and Irish statistics: Recovering Ireland’s civil registration statistics, 1864-1920
Abstract: Civil registration of vital statistics was introduced in Ireland in 1864, yet historians have often viewed the resulting data as unreliable due to weak incentives for compliance and uneven administrative capacity. This paper reassesses the performance of Ireland’s vital registration system by tracing its legal origins, documenting its institutional development, and re-evaluating its demographic […]
Remote Investing in Latin America, 1869-1929
Abstract: Substantial amounts of British capital flowed to Latin America during the first era of globalisation. Companies financed by this capital were typically headquartered in the UK, but operated thousands of miles away. This paper asks how this geographic separation between governance and business activities affected the valuation of these firms. We find that the […]
Procuring Promising Provisions: the British Patent System and the Navy Proviso, 1794–1831
Abstract: In 1794, the British State intervened in the patent system by introducing the Navy proviso, a legal proviso targeted at select patents compelling the patentee to supply their invention to the State on terms set by state-appointed adjudicators. This study employs new patent and archival data to examine the proviso’s origins, administration, and which […]
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 […]
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 […]
Do Firms Issue More Equity When Markets Become More Liquid? The Case of Imperial Germany, 1898–1913
Abstract: Based on new aggregated data on initial and seasoned equity offerings (IPOs and SEOs) on the Berlin Stock Exchange before the First World War on a monthly basis and in combination with several other available datasets, we test the hypothesis presented by Hanselaar, René Stulz, and Mathijs (2019. Do Firms Issue More Equity when […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lobbying for Industrialization: Theory and Evidence
Abstract: Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than 150 years of data on parliamentary petitions in USA and Britain, we measure historical lobbying […]
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