Very few empirical studies have analyzed the labor market performance of internal migrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using a new dataset, this article examines the occupational attainment of migrants, mostly internal migrants, in the city of Barcelona. We find that, in...

This article analyses the forced labour system created in Spain during the Civil War and maintained during the Francoist dictatorship, paying special attention to the economic logic that led the state and private enterprises to draw a profit from this kind of punishment. In order to deal with...

The emergence of the gold standard has for a long time been viewed as inevitable. Fluctuations of the gold-silver exchange rate in world markets were accused to lead to brutal and unsustainable switches of bimetallic countries' money supplies. However, more recent work has shown that the option...

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a...

Long-run trends in Africa's well-being are provided on the basis of a new index of human development, alternative to the UNDP's HDI. A sustained improvement in African human development is found that falls, nonetheless, short of those experienced in other developing regions. Within Africa,...

This paper presents a new picture of the labor market effects of technological change in pre-WWII United States. I show that, similar to the recent computerization episode, the electrification of the manufacturing sector led to a "hollowing out" of the skill distribution whereby workers in the...

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth-century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration,...

The National Monetary Commission was deeply concerned with importing best practice. One important focus was the connection between the money market and international trade. It was said that Britain's lead in the market for "acceptances" originating in international trade was the basis of its...

Long-range market integration is an essential component of globalization but it is still comparatively under-researched. The conventional wisdom relies heavily on the case of Atlantic trade in the period after 1870. This paper covers also the Indian Ocean and extends the period under...