On their intensive margins, firms in the British engineering industry adjusted to the severe falls in demand during the 1930s Depression by cutting hours of work. This provided an important means of reducing labour input and marginal labour costs, through movements from overtime to short-time...

With a per capita GDP estimated to be 20% higher than that of Great Britain, Song dynasty China (c. 960-1268) experienced a remarkable Commercial Revolution. We trace its origin to a tax reform forced upon the emperor by an exogenous war shock (the An-shi Rebellion of 755-763) during the...

The key challenge to assessing the legal origins view of financial development is identifying exogenous changes in legal systems. We assemble new data on the British and French concessions in Shanghai between 1845 and 1936. Two regime changes altered the degree to which the British common and...

This essay provides an historical background for understanding the statistics on veterans that will appear in the millennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. It describes changes in the number of veterans, and in the benefits provided by governments to veterans, from...

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining U.S. wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change,...

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the adoption of copyrights – as a result of the timing of Napoléon’s military victories in Italy – to examine the effects of copyrights on creativity. To measure changes in creative output we compare changes in the creation of new operas across...

More than 30 million people migrated to the US between late-ninetieth- and earlytwentieth- century, and thousands became inventors. Drawing on a novel dataset of immigrant inventors in the US, we assess the city-level impact of immigrants’ patenting and their contribution to the technological...

The Mongol conquest was one of the bloodiest wars in human history. The Mongol conquest of China (1205-1279 AD) continued to have persistent negative effects on long-term development, even centuries after the war. Using newly assembled war, population, and 16th century county-level agricultural...

Taxes have existed in Denmark since at least as far back as the earliest surviving written sources. This paper concerns the role taxation has had on shaping Danish society alongside the development of Danish democracy