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Impending abolition of slavery in Brazil during the late nineteenth century meant the potential shortage of labor for southeast coffee planters. In preparation, the province of São Paulo subsidized, in part and then in full, the travel expenses of Europeans who migrated there. To what extent was the program successful in capping the wage bill of planters after emancipation? How did the occupational distribution by race change as compared to other regions without such a program? Consolidated evidence on wages and the value of output indicates that the return to labor actually increased after abolition, as did rural and urban employment segregation in favor of whites over blacks; in contrast, economic growth elsewhere in the Americas was more subdued and alternatives like sharecropping prevailed. This work integrates the traditional immigration literature with recent Afro-Brazilianist perspectives: New earnings estimates confirm that Europeans were exploited to nearly the same extent as slaves, yet non-monetary benefits and racism may have supported the former group’s opportunities for social mobility.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between output volatility and growth using the standard GARCH-M framework and the US monthly industrial production index (IPI) for the period January 1919–December 2017, by taking into account the presence of shocks and variance changes. The results show that the IPI growth is strongly affected by large shocks which are associated with strikes in some industries, recessions, World War II and natural disasters. We also identify several subperiods with different level of volatility where the volatility declines along the subperiods, with the pre-WWII period (1919–1946) the highest volatile period and the aftermath period of the GFC (2010–2017) the lowest volatile period. We find no evidence of relationship between output volatility and its growth during the full sample 1919–2017 and also for all the subperiods. From a macroeconomic point of view, this implies that economic performances, as measured by IPI growth, do not depend on the uncertainty as measured by IPI volatility.

We model a game between an authority, seeking to implement its state identity, and a parental generation, seeking to socialize a younger generation into their own identity. The authority first selects a coercion level against the non-state identity. The parental generation then chooses whether to insurrect in response to the coercion level and, if not, decides how much to invest in socializing their children into the non-state identity. In this overlapping generations model, we formalize and explore the consequences of an intrinsic negative reaction to coercion: coercion resentment. We show how coercion resentment can create an interval where coercion has negative efficacy in imposing the state identity. This causes the rational legitimacy maximizing authority to restrain its use of coercion. We then show how this inefficacy of coercion can make certain levels of coercion unimplementable without causing the non-state identity to insurrect. This causes the long-run equilibrium size of the non-state identity group to be dependent on their initial size and, thus, path dependence. We consider the validity of the model by reviewing two historical episodes: Stalin’s secularization project (1922–1953) and the Counter-Reformation in early modern France and the Holy Roman Empire (1517–1685).

As it is usually believed that cooperatives made a great contribution to the modernisation of agriculture and when they began to spread agriculture still had a great weight in European economies, it is of interest to know why agricultural cooperatives had uneven success, both from one crop to another and between and within countries. In this article, I focus on the intriguing case of wine, a product of great importance to Mediterranean Europe. After defending that, in actual fact, wine cooperatives were generally unable to offer members important economic advantages; I argue that they only flourished where some ‘local’ factor increased the attraction of belonging to them and, in addition, it was possible to finance their construction. I use what happened in France as a reference and show that in Spain both circumstances only converged in (a part of) Catalonia, as a paradoxical result of inequality and the social conflicts caused by a sharecropping contract called rabassa morta.

The article Crowding out the change: business networks and persisting economic elites in the South of Italy over Unification.

This article provides the first series of Chilean adult male height for the whole of the twentieth century. The height of adult males increased by about 5.5 cm during the twentieth century, primarily during the second half of this period. This is the greatest improvement in biological welfare in Chilean history; Chilean males have never been as tall as they are today. Using a sample of around 36,371 individuals, we document the evolution of the average height of Chilean soldiers (male) born from the 1900s to the 1990s. This sample can be safely taken as a good proxy of the average height of Chilean male population for the period under study. We provide an explanation of both the main determinants of physical stature and the rapid increase in height in Chile over this period.

In this article, we study the effect of the Unification on the network power of economic elites in the South of Italy. We study the persistence of economic elites as evidence of the stability of the institutional set up beyond the effect of Unification, and thus as a primary explaining factor of the persistence of social forces slowing and opposing modernization. We use original archival data on the universe of Naples enterprises to build the networks of business relations between individual economic actors for the 20-year period immediately before and after Unification. The persistence of network power and its determinants is tested via a difference-in-difference model. The main finding is that economic elites persist over Unification. The long-term business relations, rooted in the Bourbon period, the persisting lobbying power of the financial industry, the close collusive ties with potential foreign competitors and the closeness to politics after 1861 are all elements that explain how the Southern economic elites were able to crowd-out the change.