In contrast to many other commodities, crude oil trading is a relatively new phenomenon. The end of the concession system in the 1970s caused the oil value chain to disintegrate and a spot market for crude oil to emerge. Oil traders, in particularly the infamous US oil trader Marc Rich, have...

The consumer cooperatives have the longtime tradition and perspective in the world. The Czech consumer cooperatives have been gone through a favourable time periods and a less favourable time periods in their history. This article presents the main problematic spheres of current cooperative...

This paper uses the Jeffersonian Embargo enacted in 1807 to estimate the welfare costs of autarky. I use an Armington trade model to compute the welfare losses using two sufficient statistics: the share of expenditures on domestic goods and the elasticity of substitution between domestic and...

The article is devoted to the evolution of the foreign trade relations of Russia during the reign of Mikhail Romanov (1613-1645). The author analyzes the routes of foreign trade, the range of export goods, social composition of the merchants, the changes of foreign trade geography. The special...

This paper estimates the impact of railroads in the United States between 1850 and 1910 on economic development, fertility, and human capital. A novel identification strategy, which relies on a dynamic instrument, allows me to control for unobservables using county fixed effects. I find that...

Sustained energy price increases in the United States have preceded declines in economic activity as far back as 1890. This finding applies to two different historical GDP data sets. It suggests a much longer national experience with rising energy prices that began well before the period after...