This contribution offers a comparison between the economic crises of the late-1920s and the first energy crisis of the 1970s through an inquiry into the changing balance between the transnational supply of capital and domestic aggregate demand for fixed capital formation and consumer goods. Its...

This paper examines the effect of trade integration and comparative advantage on one of a country's institutions, which in turn inuences its economic efficiency. The environment we explore is one in which a country's lower classes may revolt and appropriate wealth owned by a ruling elite. The...

The problems posed by monetary policy cannot be dealt with by legislating enduring policy rules. With the passage of time, economic understanding does not systematically converge ever more closely on a "true" model of the economy, a process which is now sufficiently far along that our current...

This paper exploits exogenous features of the 1960s/70s container revolution to estimate the impact of the introduction of refrigerated containers (or reefers) on new trade of temperature sensitive products. Our identification strategy is justified by a historical narrative which suggests that...

This paper proposes somatic capital as a hitherto neglected variable in the discussion of factors impacting the timing of the Neolithic transition. It develops an evolutionary growth theory that builds on the trade-off between the quantity and the quality of offspring. The theory suggests that...

This paper suggests that feedback effects between technological progress and human longevity lie at the heart of their common emergence in human history. It connects two major research questions. First, the long life span after menopause is a unique but puzzling feature of humans among primates....

Technological revolutions are often accompanied by substantial stock price reversals, but previous literature has produced competing explanations for why this is the case. This paper brings new evidence to this debate using data from the innovation-driven British Bicycle Mania of 1895-1900, in...

Between 1966 and 1976, China experienced a Cultural Revolution (CR). During this period, the education of around 17 birth cohorts was interrupted by between 1 and 8 years. In this paper we examine whether, and by how much, this large-scale schooling interruption affected their children's...

During the Cultural Revolution China embarked on a remarkable, albeit temporary, expansion of post-primary education in rural areas. This education expansion affected tens of millions of children who reached secondary school age in the late 1960s and 1970s. Exploiting the education expansion and...

This paper provides new evidence on educational disruptions caused by the Cultural Revolution and identifies the returns to schooling in urban China by exploiting individual-level variation in the effects of city-wide disruptions to education. The return to college is estimated at 49.8% using a...

Violent conflict is common among the poorest countries and clearly one of the most important barriers to growth, destroying physical, human, and social capital, often in the long run. At the same time, it is a development `trap' that is not easy to escape from as poverty has also been found to...

This paper assesses the attitude of investors towards Democratic change by performing an event study using Russian government bonds. The Revolution of 1905 offers an ideal occasion as, alongside the related revolutionary events, it was accompanied by two opposing constitutional changes within a...

Robert W. Clower's article "The Keynesian Counter - Revolution: A Theoretical Appraisal" (1965) deeply influenced the course of Keynesian macroeconomics by contributing to the transition from IS/LM macroeconomics to fix - price theories. Des pite this influence, no scholar proposed to explain...

Foreword -- Preface -- Introduction: in search of economic policies to stabilise democratic transitions / Giacomo Luciani -- Reflections on the arab uprisings / Samir Makdisi -- Rethinking the rentier curse / Adeel Malik -- A brief political economy of energy subsidies in the Middle East and...