We estimate the contribution of the American precious metal windfall to West Europe's growth performance in the early modern period. The exogenous nature of American money arrivals allows for identification of monetary effects. We find that more than half of West Europe's growth can be...

Does international financial integration boost economic growth? The question has been discussed controversially for a long time, and a large number of studies has been devoted to its empirical investigation. As of yet, robust evidence for a positive impact of capital market integration on...

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical regularities on international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the contribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional...

The 1890s depression in Australia was both deeper and more prolonged than those in Argentina, Canada or New Zealand. In the Australian literature the severity of the depression is explained as resulting from the magnitude and speculative nature of the preceding boom and the impact of a severe...

Most contemporary historians have proposed a multitude of supply-side factors that arguably propelled the Great Divergence between the West and the East. A late nineteenth-century economist, George Gunton, instead proposed a demand-centric theory to explain the root cause for the divergence...

This paper extends our previous work on grain market integration across Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dobado, García-Hiernaux and Guerrero, 2012). By using the same econometric methodology, we now present: 1) a search for statistical evidence in the East of...

This paper addresses two important topics in recent economic historiography: globalization and the great divergence. We first present a search for statistical evidence in the Far East of an “Early Globalization” comparable to the one ongoing in the West since the mid-eighteenth century....