Recent research in economic history has found that mortgage debt in relation to GDP has taken off in the historical long run ("great mortgaging"), as growing banking assets have been redirected into mortgage credit. This paper maps the parallel long-run investment history of private (life)...

The name of Margaret Garritsen de Vries may not be the first that pops into people’s mind when thinking about the International Monetary Fund. It is through her work, as long-standing official Fund Historian, that those interested in the Fund history will travel through. An operational...

"Work Requirements reframes the history of work-based social welfare practice as a representational project tasked with shoring up the inherent meaningfulness of work, examining what Todd Carmody calls the "print culture of social welfare" to show how work became an indicator of social...

We argue that China, with its long history, a relatively stable political system, and multiple regime changes, provides us an opportunity to investigate the political economy of administrative hierarchy. Using prefecture-level panel data and exploiting regime changes during AD1000-2000, we find...

In contemporary democracies, global capitalism exerts a significant influence over how state power is exercised, raising questions about where political power resides in global politics. This question is important, since our specific considerations about justifiability of political power, i.e....

By analysing narrative evidence from British newspapers, this paper examines when expectations of deflation ended during the recovery of the 1930s. Examining monthly macroeconomic data, contemporary price reports, and daily policy announcements, we show that despite a speculative boom and rising...

This paper replicates a classic study of the American business elite. The older study done a half-century ago, reported the composition of business leaders a century ago. I have" drawn a sample of business leaders today to discover how much the composition of the" American business elite has...

Before the middle of the nineteenth century most laws enacted in the United States were special bills that granted favors to specific individuals, groups, or localities. This fundamentally inegalitarian system provided political elites with important tools that they could use to reward...