ARTICLES
Ethnic enclaves and immigrant outcomes: Norwegian immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration
Katherine Eriksson
Pages 427–446
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez013
This paper examines the effect of ethnic enclaves on economic outcomes of Norwegian immigrants in 1910 and 1920, the later part of the Age of Mass Migration. Using various identification strategies, including county fixed effects and an instrumental variables strategy based on chain migration, I consistently find that Norwegians living in larger enclaves in the United States had lower occupational earnings, were more likely to be in farming occupations, and were less likely to be in white-collar occupations. Results are robust to matching method and choice of occupational score. This earnings disadvantage is partly passed on to the second generation.
Patent disclosure and England’s early industrial revolution
Gary W Cox
Pages 447–467
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez012
Did the English patent system helps to spark the Industrial Revolution? Most scholars addressing this question have focused on whether patents improved the economic incentive to invent. In contrast, I focus on whether patents improved access to useful knowledge—via the requirement (instituted in 1734) that patentees provide technical specifications for their inventions. I documented a structural break in per capita patenting in 1734—but only in London, where specifications were stored. I also documented a structural shift in London-based inventors’ responsiveness to non-metropolitan patents in 1734, when specifications for them became regularly available.
Colonialism and rural inequality in Sierra Leone: an egalitarian experiment
Stefania Galli and Klas Rönnbäck
Pages 468–501
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez011
We analyze the level of inequality in rural Sierra Leone in the early colonial period. Previous research has suggested that the colony was established under highly egalitarian ideals. We examine whether these ideals also are reflected in the real distribution of wealth in the colony. We employ a newly assembled dataset extracted from census data in the colony in 1831. The results show that rural Sierra Leone exhibited one of the most equal distributions of wealth so far estimated for any preindustrial rural society.
The Crafts–Harley view of German industrialization: an independent estimate of the income side of net national product, 1851–1913
Ulrich Pfister
Pages 502–521
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez009
Novel information on land rent is used to estimate the income side of German net national product (NNP) in 1851–1913 without recourse to output side aggregates. The new series shows higher values during the initial part of the period of observation, which narrows the wedge that opens up between existing estimates of NNP before the 1880s. The results support a modified Crafts–Harley view of the first phase of German industrialization: despite rapid catch-up growth of industrial leading sectors from the 1840s to the 1870s, the pace of aggregate growth accelerated only gradually. The initially small size of the modern sector and the simultaneity of the first phase of industrialization and the first wave of globalization account for this paradox. The labor share remained largely constant; the decline of the land share in NNP was compensated by a rise of the capital share.
Wildcat bankers or political failure? The Irish financial pantomime, 1797–1826
Seán Kenny and John D Turner
Pages 522–577
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez010
Using a new biography of banks, we examine the stability of Irish banking from 1797 to 1826 by constructing a failure rate series. We find that the ultimate cause of the frequent and severe banking crises was the crisis-prone structure of the banking system, which was designed to benefit the political elite. There is little evidence to suggest that wildcat banking or the failure of the Bank of Ireland to act as a lender of last resort were to blame. We also find that the main economic effect of the episodic crises was major diminutions in the money supply.
Exhibitions, patents, and innovation in the early twentieth century: evidence from the Turin 1911 International Exhibition
Giacomo Domini
Pages 578–600
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez004
This paper investigates the relevance for innovation of international exhibitions. While the first of these events, i.e., London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, was an “exhibition of innovations,” many of the subsequent ones, following the model of industrial exhibitions developed in France, did not select exhibits based on novelty. In fact, they displayed a large spectrum of products, ranging from machines to primary products. Therefore, the suitability of data from their catalogs for proxying innovation, and their relationship to the traditional patent measure, should be better qualified. To do so, this paper performs an in-depth analysis of the Turin 1911 international exhibition, a medium-sized representative “French-model” exhibition. It matches a new database, built from the catalog of this event, with patents granted in Italy, revealing substantial differences. Furthermore, it evaluates how inventors could use the exhibition to promote their ideas, establish their reputation, and develop their career.
The extent of citizenship in pre-industrial England, Germany, and the Low Countries
Chris Minns and others
Pages 601–625
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez005
Citizenship was the main vehicle through which urban authorities granted political and economic rights to their communities. This article estimates the size of the citizenry and citizenship rates for over 30 European towns and cities between 1550 and 1849. While the extent of citizenship varied between European regions and by city size, our estimates show that citizenship was more accessible than previously thought.
GINO LUZZATTO DISSERTATION PRIZE, 2017/2019
Gino Luzzatto Prize by the European Historical Economics Society for the best dissertation in economic history submitted between June 2017 and June 2019 — Summaries of the finalists' PhD theses
Page 626
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heaa015
Every second year since 1996, the European Historical Economics Society (EHES) awards a prize for best PhD dissertation on European economic history, defended over the last two years. The prize is named after Italian economic historian Venetian Gino Luzzatto (1878 – 1964). At the EHES Conference in Paris, 29th- 31th August 2019, the prize for 2017/2019 was awarded to Thilo Albers – Humboldt, Berlin (PhD, London School of Economics). We publish the summaries of the three finalists of the Gino Luzzatto prize competition.
Trade frictions, trade policies, and the interwar business cycle
Thilo N H Albers
Pages 627–628
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez023
The wide scope of the study of economic history encompasses the long-run evolution of living standards, sudden crises, their politics, and their consequences. This thesis is about the mother of all modern economic crises. Like no other event, the Great Depression should change economic policy in the twentieth—and as we painfully learned 10 years ago—the twenty first-century. Rightfully, much ink has been spilled on the monetary origins of the Depression, be they of systematic (Eichengreen) or executive (Friedman) nature. Together with novel research agendas of how crises propagate through financial channels, we now have a much fuller picture of the Great Depression. Yet, in one key area of economics, we have arguably made little progress in our understanding of global crises since the 1930s. We have not yet confronted the question of how important real trade linkages are in a Great Depression-type event in a way that allows us to sensibly discuss how devastating misguided trade policies can be. The first part of this thesis aims to fill this blind spot, providing important lessons for economic history and economics. The second part of this thesis focuses on political and geographical trade frictions and the politics underlying them. Combining these two parts yields policy recommendations for economic crises in the twenty first-century.
The interactions between monetary and fiscal policies in Britain during the French Wars (1793–1821)
Pamfili Antipa
Pages 629–630
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez017
What causes prices to evolve? This question lies at the heart of economics, a science concerned with the human decision-making process. Prices contain most relevant information for investment, consumption, or production decisions; they also reflect the equilibrium conditions of markets.
For a central bank, a comforting answer to the above question would be “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output” (Friedman 1970, p. 24). In my PhD, I show, on the contrary, that the central bank is incapable of maintaining price stability when fiscal policies do not guarantee a sustainable public budget. The importance of fiscal policy for the determination of the price level has been emphasized in a number of papers, such as Chamley and Polemarchakis 1984, Del Negro and Sims 2015, Tobin 1961, Sargent and Wallace 1981, and Woodford 2001. These articles serve as the theoretical backdrop to my analysis.
Rural livelihoods and agricultural commercialization in colonial Uganda: conjunctures of external influences and local realities
Michiel De Haas
Pages 631–632
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez016
