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% […]
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 […]
Applied Economic History as Practical Historicism: Encouraging Policymakers to Reason with the Past
Abstract: This paper examines how applied history can contribute to policymaking when understood as a way of structuring judgement under uncertainty rather than as a source of policy lessons or predictions. It argues that economic history is particularly well suited to facilitating this role because it combines institutional analysis with disciplined comparison of plausible alternatives […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Ends of 27 Big Depressions
Abstract: How did countries recover from the Great Depression? In this paper, we explore the argument that leaving the gold standard helped by boosting inflationary expectations, lowering real interest rates, and stimulating interest-sensitive expenditures. We do so for a sample of 27 countries, using modern nowcasting methods and a new dataset containing more than 230,000 […]
What can we learn from historical pandemics? A systematic review of the literature
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 that occurred since the Industrial Revolution and prior to Covid-19. Our literature searches were conducted between June 2020 and September 2023, with the final review encompassing 169 research papers selected […]
Songlines
Abstract: This paper examines the long-term economic impacts of the adoption of local knowledge during European colonisation. We use the case of Australia, where Aboriginal knowledge of the landscape was integral to colonial exploration and settlement. To quantify the effects of this knowledge, we construct a newly digitised and georeferenced dataset of trade routes created […]
Collective Victimhood Narratives in Far-Right Communities on Telegram
Abstract: Feelings of collective victimhood have been demonstrated to have a strong effect on ingroup bias, outgroup hostility and support for violence. The use of narratives stirring these feelings in far-right communications is especially concerning given their inclusion in the manifestos of several mass killers across Europe and North America. However, scholars still have little […]
Should History Change The Way We Think About Populism?
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 which populism is ‘an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy’. We make three historical arguments. First, late 19th century US Populists were […]
Tracing Sustainability In The Long Run: Genuine Savings Estimates 1850 – 2018
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 contemporary economic research. GS derives from the theoretical work on wealth accounting, and addresses shortcomings in conventional metrics of economic development by incorporating broader measures of saving and investment, including […]
The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism, 1776–Present
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, but others prioritise economic development. The potential conflict between these two goals shapes nationalist policy making. Drawing on historical case studies from thirty countries – from the American Revolution to […]
How the Other Half Died: Immigration and Mortality in U.S. Cities
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 made up one-third of the population in crowded American cities, contemporaries blamed high urban mortality rates on the newest arrivals. We evaluate how the implementation of country-specific immigration quotas in […]
Economic Penalties based on Neighborhood, and Wealth Building
Abstract: Building wealth over lifetimes became possible for a broader span of the population in developed countries over the 20th century compared to any time in history. This was driven by more people having the capacity to save because of the expansion of middle-class jobs and education, access to highly developed financial markets, and government […]
The Country They Built: Dynamic and Complex Indigenous Economies in North America before 1492
Abstract: The economic history of the United States is that of Europeans and their institutions. Indigenous nations are absent. This absence is partly due to a lack of data but perhaps also to a perception that Indigenous communities contributed little to U.S. growth. Three case studies explore the economic complexity and social stratification across different […]
When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons
Abstract: Social scientists have long been interested in how intergroup contact or elite messaging can reduce or eliminate racial biases. To better understand the role of religious elites in these political questions, we show how a church location’s income and racial characteristics interact with racial and economic ideologies to shape the political content of sermons. […]
Public Good or Public Bad? Indigenous Institutions and the Demand for Public Goods
Abstract: This paper argues that the underprovision of public goods can be partly explained by lower demand from Indigenous groups with high preferences for Indigenous identity and a high capacity for coordination. Examining the post-Mexican Revolution period (1920s-1950s), when the state used the first road network for nation-building, our diff-in-diff analysis shows that pre-colonial political […]
The Long-Run Effects of Temporarily Closing Schools: Evidence from Virginia, 1870s-1910s
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 and income in adulthood. Those affected by the closures had lower intergenerational economic mobility, particularly those from low-income backgrounds. The age at which the closures occurred also played a role […]
No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the U.S. Congress
Abstract: We study agency frictions in the United States Congress. We examine the longstanding hypothesis that political elites engage in conflict because they fail to internalize the associated costs. We compare the voting behavior of legislators with draft age sons versus draft age daughters during the conscription-era wars of the20th century. We estimate that having […]
The Effect of Immigration Restrictions on Local Labor Markets: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure
Abstract: In the 1920s, the United States substantially reduced immigration by imposing country-specific entry quotas. We compare local labor markets differentially exposed to the quotas due to variation in the national-origin mix of their immigrant population. US-born workers in areas losing immigrants did not benefit relative to workers in less exposed areas. Instead, in urban […]
and 
by