The main objective of this paper is to examine the historical importance of both the “Andean cycle” (1899-1945) and the “October cycle” (1945-1948 y 1958-1989) in order to determine the checks and balances between both of them and the new Bolivarian cycle started 1999. The paper contains...

The paper reconsiders the nature of mining districts and property rights during the California gold rush. According to a widely accepted view advanced by Umbeck (1977, 1981), in the absence of effective legal authority, district codes established secure property rights in mining claims. Drawing...

The rise of the “New History of Capitalism” as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the “New History of Capitalism,” and explain how the different...

This paper surveys the small, yet growing, literature that uses game theory for economic history analysis. It elaborates on the promise and challenge of applying game theory to economic history and presents the approaches taken in conducting such an application. Most of the essay, however, is...

Recent histories of Ancient Greece describe a transition from customary law to public criminal justice between 800 and 400 B.C. This narrative contains three pieces of evidence against the presumption that prisons are a public good and government must provide incarcerations. First, before the...

In this paper we investigate the link between government debt-to-GDP ratio and real per capita income growth in Italy over 1861-2009. We model our regression analysis on a standard production function. Our results support the hypotheses of a negative relation between public debt and growth and...

Literature on convergence among Latin American countries is still scarce compared to other regions. Almost none of the research connects convergence to the economic history of Latin America and the usual finding is one speed of convergence assuming one globally stable steady-state. In this paper...

This introductory piece provides some context to the special edition on business and economic history of Chile and Latin America. It also provides an introduction to better understanding research and method in business history while inviting for this field to be further developed in Chile.

This paper presents an institution - the Community Responsibility System (CRS) - which has been a missing link in our understanding of market development. The CRS fostered market expansion throughout pre-modern Europe by providing the contract enforcement required for impersonal exchange...

This paper offers (yet another) reflection on the history and current status of economic history. No other sub-discipline of economics or history has tried so hard to be loved as economic history. That love is unrequited, because economic history's problem is existential: it is an inherently...