How did the US become a land of opportunity? Previous historical research on intergenerational mobility has focused on father-son income correlations, masking the role of mothers. We introduce a new mobility measure that incorporates both parents’ human capital, develop a latent variable...

This paper studies how and why anti-Irish sentiment in 19th century England spills over onto jury decisions at London's Old Bailey Central Criminal Court. We classify the (perceived) ethnicity of courtroom participants according to whether they have distinctly Irish or English surnames based on...

This paper studies how and why anti-Irish sentiment in 19th century England spills over onto jury decisions at London’s Old Bailey Central Criminal Court. We classify the (perceived) ethnicity of courtroom participants according to whether they have distinctly Irish or English surnames based...

This working paper investigates the tension between market forces and welfare policies by applying Karl Polanyi's "double movement" study to pre- and posttransformation Poland. The analysis aims at providing a comprehensive perspective on how poverty relief policies impacted and have been...

This paper studies how and why anti-Irish sentiment in 19th century England spills over onto jury decisions at London’s Old Bailey Central Criminal Court. We classify the (perceived) ethnicity of courtroom participants according to whether they have distinctly Irish or English surnames based...

Plantation elites continued to dominate local colonial governments in the British West Indies even after the abolition of slavery in 1834, directing public spending towards maintaining public order and protecting their property. As such they resisted any reforms that threatened their power,...

Can a brief period of economic prosperity leave a legacy of long-term adversity for local populations? This study investigates the enduring impact of the Amazon rubber boom around 1900 on contemporary income, inequality, Indigenous groups presence, and forest conservation. Identification...

The correspondence of historical personalities serves as a rich source of psychological, social, and economic information. Letters were indeed used as means of communication within the family circles but also a primary method for exchanging information with colleagues, subordinates, and...

Economic and social scientists are increasingly interested in historical data, but many relevant sources are still available in analog form, limiting accessibility and research potential. This article introduces the WBdigital database, which aims to improve this situation. The database provides...

This paper is an institutional study of the patent systems of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and its successor states Belgium and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. The patent law of 1817 gave the state wide discretion to accept or refuse patents and to customise their duration,...

The 1970s oil shocks sparked high and persistent inflation in advanced economies, also tied to the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971 that left monetary policy without a stable institutional reference framework. Only in the following decades did a new monetary...

How did the US become a land of opportunity? We show that the country’s pioneering role in mass education was key. Unlike previous research, which has focused on father-son income correlations, we incorporate both parents in a new measure of intergenerational mobility that considers multiple...

Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) find that labor demand shocks in 19th-century Britain had an impact on master and servant prosecutions, as breaking an employee contract was a criminal offense until 1875. We first reproduce all regression tables in Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) and then test for robustness...

This short article introduces the German Cliometrics Database as the foundation for an article by Jopp and Spoerer (2024) who trace cliometric research on German history. This newly constructed database of every publication that (1) contributes to the historiography of Germany and (2) employs,...

This paper studies the effect of religion on the economic progress of Black Americans after Reconstruction. Southern religious institutions-particularly the Southern Baptist church-played a key role in the development of the Lost Cause mythology that helped legitimate the white supremacist...

I study the impact of industrial policy on industrial development by considering an important episode during the East Asian miracle: South Korea’s heavy and chemical industry (HCI) drive, 1973–1979. Based on newly assembled data, I use the introduction and termination of industrial policies...

This essay examines the relationship between Austrian economics and economic history. It notes their different origins as scholarly fields, and divergent trajectories over the course of the twentieth century, before discussing recent examples of cross-fertilization and pointing to areas of...

Economic history has become an increasingly broad discipline, after a temporary narrowing following the cliometric revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Increasingly sophisticated econometric techniques are used to capture the institutional detail involved in the dynamics of historical...

This article examines the role of ideas, tradition, and economic history in the context of F. A. Hayek's theory of social knowledge. While Hayek often emphasized the beneficial consequences of unintended and spontaneous action, his accounts of the transmission of ideas within society identified...

In this article I selectively survey the economic history literature on the rise of regulation in America during the Progressive Era with the goal of identifying how this literature is informed by Austrian economic theory, and how Austrian theory might contribute to our understanding of the...

This article takes a further step in identifying a more complete economic history of deindustrialization. Following the extension of the timeline and its divorce from the 1970s, this article examines the reasons for production facility relocation out of Detroit prior to the 1970s with a...

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...

Natural disasters are growing in frequency globally. Understanding how vulnerable populations respond to these disasters is essential for effective policy response. This paper explores the short- and long-run consequences of the 1906 San Francisco Fire, one of the largest urban fires in American...

This paper revisits the external economic relations in the former command economies of Central, East and Southeast Europe (CESEE) by exploring historical trade data. It provides a descriptive analysis of foreign trade statistics, drawing on the newly introduced wiiw COMECON Dataset, which...

This paper develops a functional and historical appraisal of finance. We start by proposing a taxonomy of three core, theory-driven functions of the financial system - intermediation, entrepreneurial, and accumulative - that coevolve throughout the history of capitalism. We build an empirical...

This paper examines how applied history can contribute to policymaking when understood as a way of structuring judgement under uncertainty rather than as a source of policy lessons or predictions. It argues that economic history is particularly well suited to facilitating this role because it...