Explorations in Economic History最新文献

Who could afford books in the late early-modern period? We explore how prices related to the demand for books in eighteenth-century Britain by analysing extensive bibliographic and socio-economic data based on Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Our results quantify in financial terms the difficulty of buying print products faced by most British households in the eighteenth century, and how this related to the varying levels of supply across price segments. We found no evidence of the well known claim that legislation would have led to lower prices. The inadequate supply and high cost of books make it likely that only higher-income households bought them regularly from the primary market.

This article aims to answer a provocative question: would higher prices, particularly that of milk, be beneficial for the survival of children under 2 years old? Using a database of more than 230,000 births, matched to deaths, we test this hypothesis in the context of a large Mediterranean city, Madrid, in the years 1915–1926. During this period an inflationary crisis spread from 1917 to 1921. We compare child survival, the impact of milk price fluctuations, and the summer mortality peak, controlling for socio-spatial segregation and considering all-cause mortality and mortality due to food- and water-borne illnesses, before, during and after the economic depression. A positive association between increases in the milk price and better chances of survival is statistically robust, but only observed during depression. Several explanations are discussed.

The modern business cycle features long expansions combined with short recessions, and is thus related to the emergence of sustained economic growth. It also features significant international co-movement, and is therefore associated with growing market integration and globalisation. When did these patterns first appear? This paper explores the changing nature of the business cycle using historical national accounts for nine European economies between 1300 and 2000. For the sample as a whole, the modern business cycle emerged in the nineteenth century.

This article provides novel estimates of long-term income inequality in Bulgaria and Czech Lands/Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century. Relying on newly-constructed datasets and the social tables approach, we measure inequality between salient social strata. We find that Czechoslovakia was significantly more unequal than Bulgaria before 1945. Inequality converged to similarly low levels under socialism. Decomposition analysis by social classes reveals that different levels of inequality in the first half of the century were principally driven by higher within social-class inequality in Czechoslovakia, owing to a more stratified industrial society; whereas a low dispersion within the dominant agricultural sector held down the within social-class component in Bulgaria. A dramatic fall in total inequality after 1945 was a result of the social revolution that encompassed the virtual disappearance of between social-class inequality and a marked reduction in within social-class inequality. Our findings point to the critical role of institutional and political factors in driving inequality in Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century.

Société Générale de Belgique was the world's first universal bank. It pioneered another innovation: investing in non-listed equity. We use hand-collected data to show that the bank earned significant positive risk-adjusted returns from 1850 to 1934. This offset its flat return on the listed equity portfolio and underperforming bond portfolio. Other Belgian universal banks followed this strategy. As such, we argue that this innovation laid the groundwork for other financial institutions to invest in listed and non-listed assets.

The paper uses fifty-three social tables, ranging from Greece in 330 BCE to Mexico in 1940 to estimate the share and level of income of the top 1 % in pre-industrial societies. The share of the top 1 % covers a vast range from around 10 % to more than 40 % of society's income and does not always move together with the estimated Gini coefficient and the Inequality Extraction Ratio. I provide a taxonomy of pre-industrial societies based on the social class and type of assets (land, control of government, merchant capital, citizenship) that are associated with the top classes as well as lack of assets associated with poverty.

This paper examines judicial and legislative modifications to a specific property rule, the benefit offset, which was widely employed by railroad companies during the 19th century as a way to reduce required compensation for land taken through eminent domain. At the beginning of the railroad boom, all states allowed the benefit offset; by the end of the boom, most states had banned it, some via court decisions, others via legislation. Consistent with a simple model in which a court and a legislature act as (imperfect) agents of the public: 1) challenges to the benefit offset generally began with litigation; 2) all states that litigated the offset eventually restricted it, but not always through litigation; 3) where courts chose to allow the offset, legislation restricted it, often with substantial lags; 4) those lags tended to be longer (i.e., more time passed between litigation and subsequent legislation) when the litigation efforts took place early in the track building process (at which time the offset was more likely to be socially valuable); 5) states that never banned the benefit offset were those where landowners were unlikely to have ever been harmed by the practice (principally western states with vast expanses of public and private land). The model and historical evidence illustrate how a system that grants both the court and the legislature the power to alter property rules can establish a beneficial redundancy that increases the value of modifiable property rules.

Despite its centrality in debates about the causes and consequences of the Great Depression, banking panics’ impact on the money supply during this period remains a subject of ongoing debate. Before 1936, the Fed's decentralized structure meant that panics impacted money creation regionally while monetary impulses impacted bank stability nationally. We use this structure and newly digitized data to construct monetary aggregates at the Federal Reserve district level and apply a novel identification strategy that allows us to isolate the panics’ impact on monetary aggregates. We find that panics reduced the money supply by 27%, or in other words, that panics caused most of the decline in the money supply from June 1929 to December 1932.

Customary law governed most European societies during the Middle Ages and early modern period. To better understand the roots of legal customs and their implications for long-run development, we introduce an atlas of customary regions of Ancien Régime France. We also describe the historical origins of French customs, their role as a source of law, and their legal content. We then offer some insights into the research possibilities opened by this database.

For most of human history, free wage labor was uncommon compared to various coercive institutions based on the threat of force. Latin America was no exception to this general rule. A number of scholars argue that past coercive labor institutions explain regional and national divergence within Latin America long after the institutions themselves have disappeared. A review of the literature, however, shows less agreement than is commonly recognized. There is evidence that forced labor on Spanish American mainland collapsed endogenously under its own weight, in which case it may have left few echoes in the present.