Historical political economy and long-run development – Cologne FRESH meeting May 2023

Political economy has recently been described as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behavior and institutions. Using history as a laboratory to contribute to political-economic theory and empirics has proven immensely valuable. This encompasses the use of historical data to study institutions and human behavior in the historical context but also […]

YSI – Economic History Graduate Webinar – Winter 2023

The YSI is putting out a CfP for the winter 2023 series. See their call on their website here, or read it below:   We are launching the sixth edition of the YSI-EHES Economic History Graduate Webinar this Winter. As in previous editions, we provide a platform for young researchers to present their ongoing work and […]

Smooth Sailing: Market Integration, Agglomeration, and Productivity Growth in Interwar Brazil

By Marc Badia-Miró (Universitat de Barcelona), Anna Carreras-Marín (Universitat de Barcelona) and Michael Huberman (Université de Montréal). Read the full article here The relationship between international exposure and the spatial location of economic activity has proven to be vexing problem for historians and economists. Rosés and Wolf (2019), for instance, observed that the great wave […]

Gender and the Long-Run Development Process: A Survey of the Literature

  Youssouf Merouani Department of Economic History Lund University Email: youssouf.merouani@ekh.lu.se Faustine Perrin Department of Economic History Lund University Email: faustine.perrin@ekh.lu.se Read the full paper here Why do certain countries display high gender equalities while others display low gender equalities? To what extent did women contribute to fostering economic development? Among the first economic historians […]

Trade globalization and social spending in Spain, 1850-2000

By Sergio Espuelas, Universitat de Barcelona (sergio.espuelas@ub.edu) Read the full paper here What is the impact of globalization on the Welfare State? This issue is present in current political debates in many countries around the world. Not surprisingly, it has received a growing attention in academia. However, there is no consensus yet among scholars on […]

Terms of trade during the first globalization: new evidence, new results

David Chilosi, Giovanni Federico, Antonio Tena-Junguito Read the full paper here The debates. Did trends or volatility of terms of trade hold back the global periphery? Economists and economic historians have asked this question since the 1950s, when Prebisch and Singer argued that the worsening of terms of trade of peripheral countries from the beginning of the […]

The need for a Materfamilias: How important was having a working mother during childhood regarding income mobility?

In the article “Materfamilias: The association of mother’s work on children’s absolute income mobility, Southern Sweden (1947-2015)”, Gabriel Brea-Martinez studies the association of having a gainfully working and economically independent mother with upward absolute income mobility. The article focuses on children born between the 1940s-1980s in Southern Sweden, covered by the Scanian Economic Demographic Database […]

Local Multipliers and the Growth of Services: Evidence from late 19th Century USA, Great Britain, and Sweden

by Vinzent Ostermeyer, Lund University, Department of Economic History. Read more about Vinzent’s reserach here. Read the full paper (open access) here. A common periodization of economic development is that first labor shifts out of agriculture into industry and only then the service sector grows. However, such views disregard that already during the late 19th century […]