Showing papers in "Explorations in Economic History in 2011"

TL;DR: This article developed an analytical framework for comparing colonial tax and spending patterns and applied it to eight British African colonies (1880-1940) and found that colonial fiscal systems did not adhere to a uniform logic, that minimalism prevailed in West Africa, extractive features were more pronounced in East Africa, and that Mauritius revealed characteristics of a developmental state already before 1940.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied the evolution and determinants of spatial inequalities in France using a unique database providing data on value-added, employment, and population over the entire set of French “Departements” in 1860, 1896, 1930, 1982, and 2000.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present results from seven new studies of locations in Western and Southern Europe, the US and Canada for which individual-level longitudinal data exists during the industrialization period.

TL;DR: This paper made an estimate of global inequality in early 19th century using social tables and then showed that the level and composition of global inequalities have changed over the last two centuries, reaching a high plateau around 1950s, and the main determinants for global inequality have become differences in mean country incomes rather than inequalities within nations.

TL;DR: For several centuries before the First World War women's age at first marriage in the west of Europe was higher than in the east (and in the rest of the world) as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this article, socioeconomic differences in adult mortality in southern Sweden 1815-1968, a period of transformation from an agricultural to a modern industrial society and increasing life expectancy, were investigated using micro-level data with information on demographic events, household structure and socioeconomic status.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors observed both mortality and geographical mobility in a large longitudinal dataset of French males and show that rural-urban migrants benefited from clear advantages over those who already lived in the city.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied the evolution of income inequality in central Spain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taking as case study the province of Guadalajara.

TL;DR: For example, Czechoslovak industrial labour productivity fluctuated around two-thirds of the UK level under the private sector regime between the wars as mentioned in this paper, and the deterioration of Czechoslovakia's productivity performance accelerated sharply during the 1980s, falling to around one-third of UK level.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed communalities in regional long-term growth trajectories for 24 Swedish regions and found that regional growth trends show strong common features among groups of regions in Sweden.

TL;DR: This article showed that short-term lending to the king was profitable even under worst-case scenario assumptions, and that losses sustained during defaults were more than compensated by profits in normal times.

TL;DR: The authors analyzed relative wheat price fluctuations to investigate market integration among 72 European and US cities and found that globalization has accelerated faster in the first than in the second half of the 19th century, putting the post-1850 transport revolution into perspective.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the potentialities of a new indicator measuring the value of English patents in the period 1617-1841, based on the relative visibility of each individual patent in the contemporary technical and legal literature as summarized in Bennet Woodcroft's Reference Index of Patents of Invention.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present quantitative metrics derived from patent data covering Japan, the United States, Britain and Germany and also exploits non-patent based sources, showing that Japanese domestic inventive activity exhibited a pattern of rapid modernization to the technology frontier in terms of its level, sectoral distribution and quality.

TL;DR: This article analyzed the impact on Southeast Asian urbanization of globalization and industrialization in the world economy's core countries between the 1870s and World War II and found that measures of globalization, in particular industrial production in world core and international transport costs, are much better predictors of the size of Southeast Asia's main cities than domestic factors such as total population, GDP per capita, land area or government expenditure.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed social inequality in mortality in the 19th century Sundsvall region, an area that experienced rapid industrialization after 1850 and found a strongly gendered pattern, with much higher mortality for and small health differences among men, while the results indicate increasing social inequalities in female mortality during industrialization.

TL;DR: This paper found that African Americans used both traditional, i.e., occupation-based, and nontraditional, networks to maximize inventive output and that laws constraining social-capital formation are most negatively correlated with economically important inventive activity.

TL;DR: This paper used data from a random sample of births in the Netherlands during the period 1850-1922 to examine the relationships between social class, social mobility and mortality at middle and old age.

TL;DR: This paper used anthropometric data from German soldiers who served in the Second World War to trace living standards between the 1900s and the 1920s, and found that although all social strata were hit by famine conditions, the height of farmers, urban citizens, Catholics, and especially individuals born in the highly integrated food-import regions along the coast and the banks of the Rhine declined most.

TL;DR: The authors studied men's adult mortality and longevity by socio-occupational status during industrialization in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, and found no evidence for the emergence of a socioeconomic gradient in mortality.

TL;DR: In this paper, a quantitative methodology for a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of mercantile networks within this environment is presented, which demonstrates the dynamic role of networks in the shaping of a metropolitan economy and the interplay between the two.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that tenants are more motivated to improve the holding when they have formal property rights over their improvements and that this is one of the reasons explaining the poor performance of English agriculture in the early twentieth century.

TL;DR: The link between circumstances faced by individuals early in life (including those encountered in utero) and later life outcomes has been of increasing interest since the work of Barker in the 1970s on birth weight and adult disease as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The authors examined the impact of socioeconomic conditions on health and mortality between birth and adulthood within the Sardinian community of Alghero, based on data from civil registers and military conscription lists for the period 1866-1925.

TL;DR: This article examined the real effects of paper money's introduction into colonial New England over the 1703-1749 period and found that expansion of the money stock promoted growth in modern sector activity and not the other way around.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors apply a model of early industrialization to the case of New Zealand and Uruguay in 1870-1940 and show how differences in agricultural institutions may have produced different development paths in two countries which were similar under many respects.

TL;DR: In this paper, the issue of using infant and childhood mortality as an indicator of inequality was dealt with, using microdata from the 1900 and 1910 Integrated Public Use Microsamples (IPUMS), published data from the Birth Registration Area in the 1920s, results from a number of surveys, and the Linked Birth & Infant Death Files from the National Center for Health Statistics for 1991.

TL;DR: In this paper, evidence from Williams Deacon's Bank shows that the salaries of younger women were very similar to their male counterparts; however, an ever-widening gender pay gap emerged after about 5 years seniority.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that in order to test competing hypotheses on the emergence of social mortality differentials, one has to adopt a long-term perspective, and they use historical mortality data published by different authors and contemporary data drawn from an ongoing research project.

TL;DR: In this article, the effect of currency unions on the integration of financial markets in late Medieval Central Europe was investigated and it was shown that membership in a union was significantly correlated with well-integrated markets.