Elementary schooling in North America in the early 20th century underwent major changes with the spread of graded schools with multiple classrooms and teachers to semi-urban and rural areas. Detailed schooling records from British Columbia indicate that pupil attendance responded strongly to the...

The paper examines the structural and organisational problems of social insurance systems in Brazil and the Argentine in order to illuminate current debates about pension ‘reform’. Much of the present discussion depicts social insurance ‘crisis’ as a modern phenomenon. Similarly,...

The economics literature is full of studies of monetary or currency unions ranging from the sterling area before 1914, to the Bretton Woods system later and the euro zone within the European Monetary Union today. A quick search in Econ-Lit returned over 10,000 entries among abstracts and...

This paper uses new micro-level US data to re-examine productivity leadership in cotton spinning c. 1900. We find that output aggregation problems make the Census unreliable in this industry, and that Lancashire, not New England was the productivity leader for almost every type of yarn. This is...

This paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy –those in wool and dried codfish– during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern period. The development of early modern long-distance trade was subject to three major...