This paper explores the development of market integration within the Baltic Sea region as well as between the region and England, from the early 1840s to around 1890. It exploits two new datasets on grain prices. The paper applies a new method for measuring market integration by combining a...

Several studies have examined the link between climate and health, mainly focusing on the short term impacts of extreme temperatures. This paper analyzes instead the long term relation between climate variability and health using Swedish temperature and mortality data for the period 1751-2004...

This paper examines whether the states brought together in the Italian monetary union of the nineteenth century constituted an optimum monetary area, either before or after unification. Interest rate shocks indicate close relations between states in northern Italy but negative correlations...

The paper builds on a method proposed by Geary and Stark (2002) for estimating regional incomes in Victorian Britain. This is modified by using tax data to allocate non-wage income across regions. The results suggest that the coefficient of variation of regional GDP per head was rising rapidly...

A commonly cited benefit of the pre-World War One gold standard is that it reduced the cost of international borrowing by signaling a country's commitment to financial probity. Using a newly constructed data set that consists of more than 55,000 monthly sovereign bond returns, we test if...

In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....

Revisionist estimates of growth rates during the British industrial revolution, though largely successful in presenting a more modest picture of Britain's 'take-off' prior to the 1830s, have also posed fresh analytical difficulties for champions of the new economic history. If 18th-century...

Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went...