While the influence of neighborhoods on later life outcomes is well documented, the historical processes that shaped the growth and social makeup of urban areas are less understood. We address this by analyzing newly compiled geocoded data covering the entire population of Stockholm from 1878 to...

This paper examines Indonesia's upgrading within the global nickel value chain. Indonesia's transformation from a major nickel ore exporter into an integrated producer of refined nickel products offers important lessons for resource-rich developing countries seeking economic diversification....

Gerschenkron (1962) argued that public institutions such as the State Bank of the Russian Empire spurred the country's industrialization. We test this assertion by exploiting plant-level variation in access to State Bank branches using a unique geocoded factory data set. Employing an...

Industrialization boosts aggregate incomes, but its distributional effects remain debated. We study the impact of coal-driven industrialization on unskilled labor incomes using novel panel data on wages from 667 Prussian localities (1800-1879), extended with county-level data through 1914....

The process of industrialization is typically associated with urbanization and a widening urban-rural skills gap. To what extent were these disparities driven by the direct impact on occupational attainment of living in an urban area or the result of the positive selfselection of more-skilled...

We provide evidence that financial distress induces firms to sell their technology to foreign competitors. To do so, we construct a novel, spatial panel dataset by individually researching and locating U.S. firms who signed Technology Transfer Agreements (TTAs) with the Soviet Union during the...

How does economic modernization affect group identity? Modernization theory emphasizes how labor migration led to the adoption of common identities. Yet economic development may reduce incentives to emigrate, preserving local cultures. We study England and Wales during the Second Industrial...

This paper aims to deepen understanding and knowledge regarding the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the industrialization process. Many developing countries aspire to shift from agriculture-centric economies to achieve sustainable development through industrialization. Realizing...

This study investigated how trade openness influenced the connection between industrialization and emissions of carbon in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We utilized purposive sampling technique to select 28 SSA countries from 2003 to 2021. The study used Generalised Methods of Moments as the main...

Exploiting the economic dividends of the mega-infrastructure investments related to the Belt and Road Initiative as a timely global South-South cooperation model, this study follows the New Structural Economics theory to examine the effects of the BRI membership on Africa's industrialization. A...

Over the years, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has become the pollution haven for most industrious companies around the globe due to foreign direct investment (FDI) activities. As a result, policymakers and researchers are striving to implement policies to guide the conduct of FDI since ineffective...

How does international trade affect structural transformation in developing countries? We use data on sectoral allocation of labour and value-added in 46 developing economies over the period 1995-2017 and exploit for identification plausibly exogenous variation in manufacturing imports from...

How does revolutionary technological change impact wealth inequality? We turn to the mother of all technological shocks–the Industrial Revolution–and analyze its role for wealth concentration both empirically and theoretically. Based on a novel dataset on wealth shares at the level of...

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different policies aimed at, primarily, but not exclusively, fostering industrialization....

This study investigates the political economy of industrialization in Ethiopia. It discusses the economic and political institutions during three political regimes and assesses the industrial sector's performance across these different regimes. Further, it evaluates the different industrial...

This paper identifies the determinants of industrialization in 18 African countries, 1965 to 2018, using various estimators and applying a battery of robustness checks. Industrialization in Africa is driven by historical legacies such as colonialism; geographical factors such as rainfall and...

Latin American Economic History: An Introduction to Daily Life, Debt, and Development guides readers through significant features and developments in the region's economic history from independence through 2022. In approachable language, the book introduces readers to relevant New Economic...

Gerschenkron (1962) argued that public institutions such as the State Bank of the Russian Empire spurred the country's industrialization. We test this assertion by exploiting plant-level variation in access to State Bank branches using a unique geocoded factory data set. Employing an...

This paper examines Indonesia's upgrading within the global nickel value chain. Indonesia's transformation from a major nickel ore exporter into an integrated producer of refined nickel products offers important lessons for resource-rich developing countries seeking economic diversification....

The introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) has been widely perceived as a successful instrument, boosting government revenue and stimulating industrialization. However, in countries that are heavily dependent on exports of natural resources the introduction of the VAT has led on average to...

Empirical evidence on the historical role of Compulsory Schooling Laws (CSL) for the spread of mass education is mixed at best. This is also due to the difficulty of identifying exogenous variation in the application of CSL. We exploit an almost unique feature of a CSL in 1877 Italy which was...

Creativity and innovation are now being encouraged in businesses because of technopreneurship, especially as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0) picks up. In addition, the evolution brought by technology has influenced our everyday lives, jobs and communication, making it easier for...

Bartels, Jäger and Obergruber (2024) examine how division rules for the inheritance of agricultural land affected distributional outcomes in 19th century and contemporary Germany. The authors use a regression discontinuity design to show that equal-division counties-those in which inheritance...