This paper asks whether history should change the way in which economists and economic historians think about populism. We use Müller's definition, according to which populism is 'an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy'. We make three historical...

This paper uses a new dataset on the universe of Canadian imports and tariffs between 1924 and 1936, disaggregated into 1697 goods originating in 112 countries, to analyse the impact on Canadian imports of interwar Canadian trade policy, including the 1932 Ottawa trade agreements. Rather than...

We document the outbreak of a trade war after the U.S. adopted the Smoot-Hawley tariff in June 1930. U.S. trade partners initially protested the possible implementation of the sweeping tariff legislation, with many eventually choosing to retaliate by increasing their tariffs on imports from the...

We provide a centennial overview of the Irish economy in the one hundred years following partition and independence. A comparative perspective allows us to distinguish between those aspects of Irish policies and performance that were unique to the country, and those which mirrored developments...

If social outcomes have social causation, mothers and fathers in different societies will have different effects on child outcomes. Social mobility rates on the patriline will differ from that on the matriline. From an extensive family lineage of 426,552 persons in England 1650-2023 we estimate...

Children early in the birth order get more parental care than later children. Does this significantly affect their life chances? An extensive genealogy of 428,280 English people 1680-2024, with substantial sets of complete families, suggests that birth order had little effect on social outcomes...

There have been many studies estimating the causal effect of an additional year of education on earnings. The majority employ administrative changes in the minimum school leaving age as the mechanism allowing identification. Here we survey 66 such estimates. However, remarkably, while the...

The European Marriage Pattern (EMP), in place in NW Europe for perhaps 500 years, substantially limited fertility. But how could such limitation persist when some individuals who deviated from the EMP norm had more children? If their children inherited their deviant behaviors, their descendants...

How much of Britain's high living standards and military power compared to its competitors in 1850 should be attributed to Britain having first experienced the Industrial Revolution? Examining data on real wages in the north and south of England, the Netherlands and Ireland in the Industrial...