The Smoot-Hawley Trade War
Abstract: We document the outbreak of a trade war after the United States adopted the Smoot-Hawley tariff in June 1930. U.S. trade partners initially protested, with many eventually choosing to retaliate with tariffs. Using a new quarterly dataset on bilateral trade for ninety-nine countries, we show that U.S. exports to retaliators fell by 28%–32%. Using […]
Statutory incidence and sales tax compliance: Evidence from Wayfair
Abstract: This paper studies the compliance, pricing, and progressivity effects of changing statutory incidence. The Wayfair Supreme Court decision granted U.S. states new authority to shift the statutory incidence of taxation from consumers to online and out-of-state retailers, forcing supply-side remittance of the sales tax. With state-level data, we find this increased sales tax revenues by 7.9 […]
The settlers’ fortunes: Comparing tax censuses in the Cape Colony and early American republic
Abstract: Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century had settled across the globe, from North and South America to Australia to the southern tip of Africa. While theories of institutional persistence explain the ‘reversal of fortunes’ between settled and unsettled regions, few studies consider the large differences in early living standards between settler societies. […]
Indigenous Nations and the Development of the U.S. Economy: Land, Resources, and Dispossession
Abstract: Abundant land and strong property rights are conventionally viewed as key factors underpinning U.S. economic development success. This view relies on the “Pristine Myth” of an empty undeveloped land, but the abundant land of North America was already made productive and was the recognized territory of sovereign Indigenous Nations. We demonstrate that the development […]
Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights
Abstract: Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the US, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination. This article shows that the Great Migration and support for […]
From Immigrants to Americans: Race and Assimilation during the Great Migration
Abstract: How does the arrival of a new minority group affect the social acceptance and outcomes of existing minorities? We study this question in the context of the First Great Migration. Between 1915 and 1930, 1.5 million African Americans moved from the U.S. South to Northern urban centres, which were home to millions of European […]
Boomtowns: Local Shocks and Inequality in 1920s California
Abstract: The 1920s in the United States were a time of high income and wealth growth and rising inequality, up to the peak in 1929. It was an era of technological innovations such as electrification as well as booms in consumer durables, housing, and asset markets. The degree to which these skill-biased opportunities shaped property […]
A Rising Tide? The Local Incidence of the Second Wave of Globalization
Abstract: We estimate the short- and long-run local labor market impacts of the large increase in U.S. imports and exports that occurred over the 1970s. We exploit the sequential opening of overseas shipping container ports over the period, which generated discontinuous changes in U.S. trade ows. We find that the impacts of the export shock […]
Globalization
Abstract: This chapter written for the Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy argues that you cannot understand the history of globalization without taking political factors into account; and that you cannot understand the history of comparative economic development without taking globalization into account. Globalization compels us to take geography seriously and to think more like […]
Antitrust Policies and Profitability in Nontradable Sectors
Abstract: Firms in tradable sectors are more likely to be subject to external competition to limit market power, while nontradable firms are more dependent on domestic policies and institutions. This paper combines an antitrust index available for multiple countries with firm-level data from Orbis covering more than 12 million firms from 94 countries, including 20 […]
Urban growth shadows
Abstract: Does a location’s growth benefit or suffer from being geographically close to large economic centers? Spatial proximity may lead to competition and hurt growth, but it may also improve market access and enhance growth. Using data on U.S. counties and metro areas for the period 1840–2017, we document this trade-off between urban shadows and […]
Folklore
Abstract: Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community passed through the generations by word of mouth. We introduce to economics a unique catalog of oral traditions spanning approximately 1,000 societies. After validating the catalog’s content by showing that the groups’ motifs reflect known geographic and social attributes, we present […]
Bubbles in History
Abstract: Bubbles have become ubiquitous. This ubiquity has stimulated research over the past three decades into bubbles in history. In this article, we provide a systematic overview of research into historical bubbles. Our analysis reveals that there is no coherent approach to the study of bubbles and much of the debate has unhelpfully focussed on […]
On the economic effects of Indigenous institutions: Evidence from Mexico
Abstract: While Indigenous institutions affect policy outcomes and, consequently, economic development, our understanding of this association is as yet unclear. This paper examines this relationship using land reform in Mexico as a case study. Between 1917 and 1992, the rights to 16 million hectares of ancestral land were transferred to the Indigenous population in the […]
Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814
Abstract: Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, […]
Pre-colonial institutions and socioeconomic development: The case of Latin America
Abstract: We study the effects of pre-colonial institutions on present-day socioeconomic outcomes for Latin America. Our thesis is that more advanced pre-colonial institutions relate to better socioeconomic outcomes today. We advance that pre-colonial institutions survived to our days thanks to the existence of largely self-governed Amerindian communities in rural Latin America. Amerindians groups with more […]
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