We add a historical and regional dimension to the debate on the Greek debt crisis. Analysing the 1841-1939 exchange-rate experience of Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia/Yugoslavia, we find surprising parallels to the present: repeated cycles of entry to and exit from gold, government debt...

Over the later 1920s and up to the mid-1930s, German coal-mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity led primarily by the Ruhr coalmines' performance. It is a commonly accepted view that the economy-wide 'rationalization boom' between currency stabilization and the depression years...

This paper explores regional (NUTS3) income inequality in Spain, 1860-2010. Using a novel dataset spanning 150 years, we analyse the evolution of inequality in regional per-capita GDP. To do this, we follow the growth literature and use spatial exploratory tools. Our aim is to understand not...

The city of Buenos Aires is an extreme case in immigration history since the native workers were less than one third of the labour force. This paper is the first attempt to present empirical evidence on occupations and wages for Buenos Aires ca. 1890s. Using a large dataset, we look at the...

Spanish land reform, involving the break-up of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century. This paper uses new provincial data on landless workers, land prices and agrarian wages to consider if government intervention was needed because of...

This article investigates the rise of the middle class in Brazil between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and its connection with inequality. To this purpose Brazil's income distribution is explored from two dimensions: inequality and polarisation. A new middle class index (MCI),...

This study investigates the origins of the guild revolts in late medieval central Europe. At first, using newly compiled city level data, their temporal evolution and spatial distribution is discussed. Afterwards, the paper provides a historical discussion and empirical analysis of their...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the causes of the Hungarian financial crisis of 1931. The prevailing view is that the episode was caused by monetary forces. After the October 1929 Wall Street crash, the already indebted country with high government deficits was unfavorably impacted by...

This paper uses the Chinese historical path to mass education in the early 20th century to tackles one hotly debated question - what factors explain the rise of mass schooling? Given China's political turmoil and economic backwardness through the early 20th century, the expansion of mass...

New Economic Geography (NEG) models stress the importance of access to demand as a key driver of the spatial and temporal distribution of economic activity (Krugman, 1991). Therefore, in order to test the theoretical predictions emanating from NEG a sound measure of accessibility is required. In...