This article is the first study to explore to what extent labour productivity, structural change, participation rates and the age structure of the population contributed to the pattern of Italy's regional economic inequality over the long run (1871-2011). We provide brand new regional estimates...

When studying the emergence of new global markets it is essential to consider how countries and companies compete to obtain advantageous positions. Our objective is to study how France obtained an initial leadership position in the new global wine market which it subsequently consolidated. We...

We explore the role of elites for development and in particular for the spread of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the 1880s, which was a major factor behind that country's rapid economic catch-up. We demonstrate empirically that the location of early proto-modern dairies, so-called...

Cooperatively-owned Raiffeisen banks first emerged in the Netherlands in the late 1890s and spread rapidly across the country. Using a new dataset, we investigate the determinants of their market entry and early performance. We find that the cooperative organisational form, when allied to a...

Do countries with less democratic forms of government necessarily have lower literacy rates as a consequence? Using a random sample of 4,600+ individuals from military archives in Portugal, we show that 20-year old males were twice as likely to end up literate under an authoritarian regime than...

This paper analyses the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI), exports and economic growth in Spain using annual time series data for the period 1970 to 2016. To examine these linkages the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration for the...

Abstract We present new short, medium, and long-run indicators to date and characterise expansions and contractions in financial and economic time series. These Bull-Bear Indicators (BBIs) measure the risk-adjusted excess return with respect to average, to different time horizons, expressed in...

The Napoleonic Wars had dramatic consequences for Spain's economy. The Peninsular War had higher demographic impact than any other military conflict, including civil wars, in the modern era. Farmers suffered confiscation of their crops and destruction of their main capital asset, livestock. The...

This paper provides a long-run view of well-being inequality at world scale based on a new historical dataset. Trends in social dimensions alter the view on inequality derived from per capita GDP. While in terms of income, inequality increased until the third quarter of the twentieth century; in...

The scholarly discourse about twentieth century forced labour has raised important questions. For example, how profitable and productive has the employment of forced labour been in different political and economic contexts? The dominant take-away from the literature is that forced labour comes...