The global turn towards the market of the 1980s and 1990s led some to believe that globalization was untethering itself from its political moorings. More recently, however, the combined impact of the China shock, Covid, and war have revealed even to economists what historians and political...

We introduce a new dataset on British exports at the bilateral, commodity-level from 1700 to 1899. We then pit two primary determinants of bilateral trade against one another: the trade-diminishing effects of distance versus the trade-enhancing effects of the British Empire. We find that the...

We present a new global index indicating how fixed the world's exchange rates are. Our index measures the probability of two units of GDP, randomly selected anywhere in the world, of being involved in a fixed exchange rate arrangement. This approach is invariant to alternative classifications of...

Do trade dependencies leave countries vulnerable to geopolitical coercion? We study the economic costs of trade and financial sanctions, from 1920 to the present. We first develop a continuous measure of sanction intensity, using bilateral commodity-level data to calculate the importance of...

This paper uses a new dataset on the universe of Canadian imports and tariffs between 1924 and 1936, disaggregated into 1697 goods originating in 112 countries, to analyse the impact on Canadian imports of interwar Canadian trade policy, including the 1932 Ottawa trade agreements. Rather than...

This paper asks whether history should change the way in which economists and economic historians think about populism. We use Müller's definition, according to which populism is 'an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy'. We make three historical...