Trade is a critical component of economic growth in newly settled societies. This article tests the impact of ship traffic on the Cape economy using a time-series smoothing technique borrowed from the business cycle literature and employing an econometric procedure to test for long-run...

We estimate a long-run trend of Brazilian human capital that extends back to the very beginning of the eighteenth century. With new data on selective immigration during the era of mass migrations at the end of the nineteenth century, we show that human capital endowment of international migrants...