Explorations in Economic History最新文献

This paper explores the politics of eminent domain, using a specific historical episode: the enactment of the new California constitution in 1879. It presents evidence that the failure of a constitutional provision that would have codified eminent domain powers for water development resulted from a complex interchange of economic interests among farmers, miners, and urban residents. This evidence was manifested in delegate behavior on the floor of the constitutional convention in 1878, including various roll-call votes, which are subjected to an econometric analysis. The results have implications for the interpretation of legislative eminent domain decisions, and the degree to which economic development processes are shaped by the institutional environment in which they occur.

I develop a theory to study the determination of land rights in precolonial Vietnam, in which the state uses restrictive land rights to tie landless peasants to their land, in order to collect head taxes and enforce unpaid labor services and military conscription. Using a unique national land registry in nineteenth-century Vietnam, I find suggestive evidence supporting a hypothesis that higher population density is associated with lower prevalence of private land rights. The experience of historical Vietnam stands in contrast to the standard prediction that private land rights should become more widespread when population density increases and land becomes more valuable. A comparison with the enclosure movement in premodern England provides useful lessons on the development of private land rights in an agricultural economy.

In contemporary settings, greater earnings among women are typically associated with reduced marriage rates and lower fertility. One way that women’s earnings may increase is via changes in educational attainment. To study whether educational attainment affects marriage and fertility choices in a historical setting, I rely on the variation in educational attainment among female WWII veterans created by the 1944 G.I. Bill. Using data from the long-form 1980 census, I first show that WWII veteran status is associated with reduced rates of marriage, increased age at first marriage, and lower fertility, which suggests that G.I. Bill-related education could have had an important effect for veteran women. I then use age at the time of the G.I. Bill announcement as an instrument to establish a causal effect of educational attainment on marriage and fertility outcomes among female veterans. My instrumental variable estimates suggest that each year of G.I. Bill-induced educational attainment is associated with an 8 percentage point decrease in the probability of ever getting married, a 4.7 year increase in age at first marriage, and a 0.67 reduction in the number of children. Using age at the time of the G.I. Bill announcement as an instrument is valid because the benefits could not have been easily anticipated, women had to be 21 to enlist, and the generosity of one’s G.I. Bill benefits depended on the number of years of WWII service.

The establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic in 1974 (Metapolitefsi) was characterized by an increased public demand for a less centralized political system. The main political parties that emerged responded by giving priority to the development of local and regional organizations and creating a wide network of grassroots movements. This led to a gradual introduction of more decentralized political institutions and a significant increase of expenses to prefectures and subsidies to municipalities. Building on two novel hand-collected datasets at the prefectural and municipal levels, our analysis provides empirical evidence of party favoritism in the spatial allocation of intergovernmental transfers during the first two decades of Metapolitefsi. We argue that governing parties diverted intergovernmental transfers towards their political strongholds and politically aligned mayors, as local authorities played the role of the focal points in the process of party building.

Economists have used historical heights as markers of health, living standards, and long-run development. Although possible selection bias has been debated, height measurement error is less studied. I analyze novel administrative data of male Indian indentured laborers with repeated measurements of adult height to answer an important underlying question of precision. Laborers were measured by British colonial officials on departure in India and again several years later when opting to return to India. I find no height differences for men who had attained full height in India. Younger men continued to grow even into their twenties. A caste subgroup analysis finds mostly similar results. This paper provides some of the first evidence showing height consistency in repeated measurements of adult heights.

We study the impact of the 1918 Spanish Flu on U.S. stock prices. Using a new weekly hand collected sample of 131 firms that traded on the NYSE, we examine the impact of the four waves of the flu on stock returns using panel regressions. We find that the second and fourth wave of the pandemic significantly lowered stock returns by 65.5 and 21.6 percent relative to the sample mean return, respectively. The large, but temporary impact of the virus on stock returns can probably be attributed to the fact that, unlike Covid-19, the flu hit the working age population particularly hard.

This article describes the construction and content of the Morts pour la France database. This database contains individual-level data on the universe of the 1.3 million French fatalities of the Great War who were officially recognized as war victims. It provides information on each soldier’s first and last names, dates of birth and death, circumstances of death, recruitment status, military rank and unit, and locations of birth and recruitment. We further provide datasets of military death rates at the level of 87 départements and 35 thousand municipalities along with relevant shapefiles and discuss potential applications of this database.

This paper analyzes the policies that the Castile of the seventeenth century followed toward creating and selling short-term and long-term debt paid off from the Crown's New World revenues. We use microdata to reconstruct comprehensive fiscal accounts for Spanish America during the seventeenth century. Our new time series evidence shows that the Spanish Empire maintained differential debt policies in the center and the periphery. Spanish America issued considerably less debt, more credible than coetaneous Castilian debt. However, the issuances’ size did not reflect lower debt capacity in the New World, as the Spanish Empire restrained long-term debt issuance to emergencies. We also provide complementary evidence from debt issuances and explain why differential debt policies were maintained.

Did the G.I. bill discriminate against Black World War II veterans? Using a variety of historical sources, I estimate the average amounts of G.I. benefits received by Black and white World War II veterans, as well as their cash-equivalents. These estimates suggest that Black veterans received more in benefits than white veterans, but that their cash-equivalents were lower. However, these estimates are associated with significant uncertainty.

We estimate the transmission of higher education across generations using the arrival of the Pinochet dictatorship to Chile in 1973 as natural experiment. Pinochet promoted a large contraction in the number of seats available for new students across all universities. Using census data, we find that parents who reached college age shortly after 1973 experienced a sharp decline in college enrollment. Decades after democratization, we observe that their children are also less likely to enroll in higher education. The results imply large and persistent downstream effects of educational policies over more than half a century.