ARTICLES
Government finance and imposition of serfdom after the Black Death
Margaret E Peters
Pages 149–173
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heac011
After the Black Death, serfdom disappeared in Western Europe while making a resurgence in Eastern Europe. What explains this difference? I argue that serfdom was against the interests of the sovereign and was only imposed when the nobility, who needed serfdom to maintain their economic and political standing, had leverage to impose their will. The nobility gained this power through financing the state. Using data from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, I show that serfdom was imposed and strengthened in areas where sovereigns had few other resources to finance the state.
Coffee tastes bitter: education and the coffee economy in Colombia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
María José Fuentes-Vásquez and Irina España-Eljaiek
Pages 174–195
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heac013
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coffee became the main Colombian export, turning the country into one of the world’s leading coffee producers. This agrarian commodity provided resources for coffee-growing areas, favouring the rise of mass education. However, this paper suggests that coffee led to children ceasing to attend school to work in coffee production, thus affecting the demand for education adversely. We test this hypothesis by using different empirical strategies. We conduct panel regressions and instrumental variable cross-sectional estimates. The results show that increasing coffee production negatively affects the demand for the education of primary school-age children.
Sticky wages and the Great Depression: evidence from the United Kingdom
Jason Lennard
Pages 196–222
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heac014
How sticky were wages during the Great Depression? Although classic accounts emphasise the importance of nominal rigidity in amplifying deflationary shocks, the evidence is limited. In this paper, I calculate the degree of nominal wage rigidity in the United Kingdom between the wars using new granular data covering millions of wages. I find that nominal wages changed infrequently but that wage cuts were more common than wage rises on average. Nominal wage adjustment fluctuated over time and by state, so that in 1931 amid falling output and prices more than one-third of workers received wage cuts.
The highs and the lows: bank failures in Sweden through inflation and deflation, 1914–1926
Seán Kenny and others
Pages 223–249
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/head001
This paper revisits the Swedish banking crisis (1919–1926) that materialized as post-war deflation replaced wartime inflation (1914–1918). Inspired by Fisher’s “debt deflation theory,” we employ survival analysis to “predict” which banks would fail, given certain ex-ante bank characteristics. Our tests support the theory; maturity structures mattered most in a regime of falling prices, with vulnerable shorter-term customer loans and bank liabilities representing the most consistent cause of bank distress in the crisis. Similarly, stronger growth in (1) leverage, (2) weaker collateral loans, and (3) foreign borrowing during the boom were all associated with bank failure.
Fund management in the interwar period: UK investment trust portfolio asset allocation in the 1920s
Dimitris P Sotiropoulos and others
Pages 250–277
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heac019
This study investigates the portfolio asset allocation of UK investment trusts between 1914 and 1928 using a unique hand-collected dataset of 41 companies, which comprises 40,875 portfolio holdings. UK investment trusts not only survived WWI without major losses but also had a remarkable performance in the 1920s, which led to a wave of new incorporations. The 1920s was a period of significant shifts in investment trust portfolio composition and our analysis examines the main reasons for this. We show that investment trust managers were able to adjust quickly to the new socioeconomic circumstances and secure high profitability for their shareholders.
The Portuguese budgetary costs with First World War: a comparative perspective
Ricardo Ferraz
Pages 278–301
https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heac018
In this paper, I show that the Portuguese budgetary costs with the First World War represented, on average, practically 50% of state expenditure and 7% of GDP during 1914–1918. These costs caused different negative effects on public finances and were also negatively correlated with economic growth according to the estimated results of two dynamic models. Nevertheless, Portugal’s costs with this war appear to have been lower than those of the other belligerents for which data are available, as Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States.
