Cliometrica最新文献

How does futures trading affect the intra-day volatility of spot prices? This paper contributes to the historical work on commodity markets, by using a unique early twentieth-century natural experiment to test what happens when futures trading no longer exists. In 1903, in an attempt to eliminate speculative behavior, futures trading in the Viennese grain market was banned. The permanency of this ban makes it ideal for studying its effect on volatility, using a difference-in-difference framework. Prices from Budapest, a market operating under similar conditions, sharing the same harvest regions, and embedded in a similar legal framework, are used as a control. The Budapest market constitutes an ideal control because it was unaffected by the ban and any migration of Austrian trading parties to this market was prohibited by law. This paper finds an increased intra-day volatility of spot prices and lower pricing accuracy on the Viennese spot market after the ban in comparison with Budapest, as the information-transmission and risk-allocation functions of this city’s futures market were no longer maintained.

Internal circular migration has historically played an important role in the mobility patterns and assimilation of migrants in Western societies, with a particularly significant and persistent role in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article analyses the determinants of this migration path during the Spanish rural exodus, focusing on a critical scenario: the Spanish tourism boom in the Balearic Islands. The results suggest that the tourism industry offered abundant low-skilled job opportunities with very low barriers to entry, rewarded with higher wages than in the regions of origin. Thus, the emerging tourism phenomenon represented a significant opportunity for those more penalised by the rural penalty, such as the very poor households of southern Spain from isolated districts. For these migrants, the findings suggest that the factors that increased the likelihood of engaging in circular migration were both ‘voluntary’, such as job and investment opportunities in the origin, and ‘involuntary’, linked to the seasonality of the host labour market, labour regulations and housing shortages. These constraints to permanent settlement were easier to overcome for those who could rely on migrant networks established in the pre-tourism era and had gendered consequences.

This paper analyses economic inequality in central Catalonia in the early 1720s using the information contained in cadastral tax records. The data set includes 2617 male taxpayers distributed across 17 rural villages. We take advantage of the large amount of information provided by the cadastre to study economic inequality in a pre-industrial society by looking at both wealth and income inequality. Compared to previous work on Western Europe, our results generally show high levels of inequality in rural Catalonia. However, inequality seems to be lower among those groups engaged in non-agricultural activities. Then, and given the traditional presence of proto-industrial activities in this area of Catalonia, we explore the effect of proto-industrial wool specialization on levels of inequality.

The spread of culture has been often paralleled with epidemic contagion. We propose to use models of this type to analyze Romanization and Christianization through onomastic data (names). We first examine the spread of Romanity in the ancient Greek world, and then the spread of Christianism, through the dynamics of Roman and Christian names acquisition. The dynamics of the transition from a pure Greek world to a Romanized world appear to have been fundamentally driven by an intense adoption of Romanity combined with an equally intense return to traditional Greek names. The transition from pagan to Christian names, on the other hand, was more permanent, leading to a more explosive acquisition pattern.

This article aims to demonstrate the existence of significant shifts in Okun’s law parameters, indicating their non-constant nature over time, and to dissect potential origins of these fluctuations. To achieve this end, extensive quarterly unemployment series are, for the first time, compiled for Spain and Italy. Through a cross-country comparison, the investigation reveals that these parameters exhibit transformations, albeit in divergent manners. The decline in productivity growth and the change in the labor structure have played an important role in these changes. The study introduces novel insights, accentuating complexity of coefficient dynamics, from a historical perspective.

This article examines the impact of climatic variability on the English Agricultural Revolution using Allen’s Nitrogen Hypothesis. While half of the variation in yields can be attributed to nitrogen-fixing plants, better cultivation, and improved seeds, the remainder can be attributed to changing climatic conditions during the relatively cold period from c. 1645–1715 and the subsequent warmer phase. The study finds that farmers made even greater efforts than observed yields during the colder and more humid climate of the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. Conversely, increasing temperatures in the following period had a positive effect on agricultural productivity, indicating that farmers' role during this phase have been overrated.

While in the early part of the nineteenth-century Jamaica was one of the world’s leading sugar producers, the abolition of slavery, the flooding of sugar markets with cheap European beet sugar, and the equalization and finally elimination of sugar import duties across the British empire led to a need for more efficient ways to produce sugar. However, it has been widely noted that Jamaica sugar estates were late in adopting more efficient production techniques, arguably due to inadequate financing. This paper investigates what role the destructive forces of hurricanes may have played in inducing Jamaica to finally modernize its sugar production. To this end, we combine a geo-referenced exhaustive data set of Jamaican sugar estates with a measure of localized hurricane damage constructed from historical hurricane tracks over the period 1882 to 1930. Our econometric analysis shows that hurricane strikes increased the probability that a surviving estate upgraded its sugar processing technology, particularly when the price of sugar was high and the price of the other main exporting crop (bananas) was low. Additionally, while a government hurricane loan programme working through local loan banks did help plantations to adopt new machinery, this depended on the damage not being too large.

This study examines the relationship between the London money market (LMM) and the credit provision of non-British overseas banks in peripheral economies during the first wave of globalisation. Using monthly data between 1889 and 1913, we find a positive relationship between the amount of credit authorised by the German Brasilianische Bank für Deutschland in Brazil and the spread between the London market and floating rate. Our results suggest that increased demand for foreign bills and/or decreased borrowing costs in the LMM leads to an increase in credit supply. We use the impact of annual tax payments on the spread between the market and floating rate as an instrumental variable (IV) to show that this relationship is causal. Although there is a significant amount of literature on London’s historic role as a global financial centre and a growing number of studies on foreign banking history, little quantitative evidence is available about the connection between the two. This study bridges this gap.