Explorations in Economic History最新文献

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? At first glance, with its rising levels of population and per capita income, it seems Russia was in a transition away from Malthusian equilibrium. However, the joint increase in population and per capita income could also have been the result of Russia’s high land-to-labor ratio. Which of the two is it? Such a problem is a frequent one in economic history, as many frontier economies have high land-to-labor ratios, which foil the researcher’s ability to determine whether an economy was transitioning or whether it was growing because of weak land constraints. In this paper, we use quarterly demographic and economic data from Moscow (which we take as a proxy for Russia) in conjunction with a Cointegrated Vector Autoregression approach to determine whether the Russian economy was transitioning away from a Malthusian equilibrium. We find signs of Malthusian pressures still operating while wages had stopped responding to changes in death and birth rates. This combination suggests that a vulnerable transition was truly underway even though a Malthusian shadow remained.

This paper presents a history of aggregate demand and supply shocks spanning 1900 – 2016 for the United Kingdom. Sign restrictions derived from a workhorse Keynesian model are used to identify the signs of those shocks. We compare the 30 largest shocks implied by a vector autoregressive model in unemployment and inflation with the narrative historical record. Our approach provides a new perspective on well-known events in economic history. We highlight two episodes of particular interest: an aggregate supply shock in the late 1920s, which we attribute to changes in the bargaining power of labor, and positive aggregate demand shocks in the mid-1970s, which we attribute to fiscal policy.

This article tests the influential democratic advantage hypothesis – that democratic governments have historically borrowed more cheaply than autocratic governments – in the context of the first financial globalization, from circa 1870 to 1913. We construct indicators of political regime types, then regress government bond spreads of 27 independent capital-importing countries on them. In contrast with the mainstream literature, the results suggest that democracies were associated with higher country risk. Our findings indicate that autocratic regimes had a significant advantage: democracies paid 5.7% more on their debt than autocracies, controlling for several financial and political variables. This gap is the equivalent of 35.4% of the negative effect defaults had on credit costs. Our conclusions hold when allowing for different definitions of political regime type and bond spreads. The correlations identified also find support in qualitative evidence, according to which creditors favored autocracies for being politically more stable than democracies.

The Malthusian model is the subject of a fierce debate within economic history. Although the positive causal relationship postulated from living standards to population growth is relatively uncontroversial for preindustrial societies, this cannot be said for the other key relationship, diminishing returns due to fixed supplies of land. We argue that Denmark, which was characterized by extreme resource and environmental constraints until the final decades of the eighteenth century, provides an ideal setting for testing whether any society was ever truly Malthusian. We employ a cointegrated VAR model on Danish data from 1731 to 1800, finding evidence for diminishing returns until ca. 1775. Yet this relationship disappears in the late-eighteenth century, consistent with an increasing pace of technological progress and the emergence of what Unified Growth Theory has termed the “post-Malthusian” era.

In April 1933, eight months prior to the end of Prohibition, states within the US gained the ability to legalize 3.2 percent alcohol beer. Proponents of legalization predicted that the brewer's dray would bring jobs along with beer. We estimate that legalization brought around 81,000 jobs between April and June of 1933, 60,000 of which were created in April, when the nation emerged from the trough of the Great Depression. This suggests that around 5.6 percent of nationwide non-agricultural spring employment gains, and around 15 percent of April job gains, were associated with beer legalization. Thus, this very early New Deal policy played an important supporting role in helping the nation turn the corner toward recovery.

Early modern warfare in Western Europe exposed civilian populations to violence, hardship, and disease. Despite limited empirical evidence, the ensuing mortality effects are regularly invoked by economic historians to explain patterns of economic development. Using newly collected data on adult burials and war events in the seventeenth-century Low Countries, we estimate early modern war-driven mortality in localities close to military activity. We find a clear and significant general mortality effect consistent with the localized presence of diseases. During years with major epidemic disease outbreaks, we demonstrate a stronger and more widely spreading mortality effect. However, war-driven mortality increases during epidemic years are of similar relative magnitude is those in non-epidemic war years. Given the omnipresence of warfare in the seventeenth-century Low Countries, war-driven mortality was remarkably constant rather than a sharp discontinuity. The economic impact of warfare likely played out over the long term rather than driven by sudden large mortality spikes creating rapid structural change.

This paper analyzes the determinants of providing financial support to revolutionaries, using a hand-compiled dataset of 17,000 donations to the Irish National Aid Association after the Easter Rising of 1916. Financial support is best predicted by literacy, marital status, religious affiliation, and relatively high socio-economic status. In this sense, donations to revolutionaries share some characteristics of a luxury good. I find evidence that long-run historical grievances (the Great Famine) also predict support.

We examine a tumultuous period in Scottish history beginning from the Reformation in 1560 until a few years after the Revolution of 1688. During this period, the Crown repeatedly provoked political crises by attempting to impose an episcopal structure on the Church of Scotland. Using time series data of witch accusations, we find that the Scottish Presbyterians were substantially more active in persecuting alleged witches during periods when they were excluded from power. Although monopoly churches can be instruments of state-making and social order, our results show that the disciplinary instruments of an established church can be turned against the state. In polities divided by factional religious conflict the suppression of sectarian groups can lead them to impose religious discipline as a counterweight to state formation.

We study how political institutions affected the decision of countries to adhere to the classical gold standard. Using a variety of econometric techniques and controlling for a wide range of relevant economic and political factors, we find that the probability of adherence to the gold standard before World War I was ceteris paribus lower for countries which were more democratic. This effect can be linked to how open the political process was to different segments of the population and the extent of political competition resulting from that. The effect was particularly relevant for peripheral countries and it influenced both the decision of countries to adopt the gold standard as well as the decision to suspend it.