Author: Nathan J. Eisner (Bard High School Early College Bronx) The gap in wealth between White and Black Americans after the abolition of slavery has been a persistent and defining element of American life. The decades following Emancipation brought the fastest convergence in racial wealth in American history, but also fierce resistance from the institutions […]
Withdrawal of the State: The Provision of Primary Schooling in Mozambique under the Indigenato
Author: Pablo Fernández-Cebrián (Universitat de València) What drives educational policy in colonial settings? Across colonial Africa, the balance between state-run and mission-run schools, the “school mix”, shaped educational outcomes, and left an imprint on levels of education that persists to this day. Yet our understanding of how and why this mix evolved remains limited. The […]
Wage Setting Institutions and Internal Migration: The Effect of Regional Wage Equalization in Italy After 1969
Author: Andrea Ramazzotti (Universitas Mercatorum) Motivation Do minimum wages create spatial mismatches in local labour markets by affecting migration decisions? Internal migration is key to the efficient allocation of labour within a country, underpinning agglomeration economies and moderating aggregate unemployment. However, internal migration has fallen across high-income countries in the past three decades, despite spatial […]
An Illusory Feeling of Stability: Bank Failures in France in the 1920s
Author: David Demilly (Banque de France, CRED & Paris-Panthéon-Assas University) Economic historians often describe the 1920s in France as a period of remarkable banking stability. This new article argues that this calm was, at least in part, an illusion. Drawing on previously unexploited archival data from Crédit Lyonnais, the Banque de France and French commercial […]
Inflation and Economic Growth in Imperial Brazil (1824-1889)
Author: Thales Zamberlan Pereira (Sao Paulo School of Economics, Fundaçao Getulio Vargas) Inflation, Prices, and the Myth of Stagnation in Imperial Brazil A new reconstruction of prices in nineteenth-century Brazil suggests that one of the country’s most persistent economic narratives is wrong. Inflation was not continuously rising across the Imperial period, and once prices are […]
Do Individuals Born into Households Without a Male Breadwinner Experience Worse Life Outcomes? The Case of Urban Spain
Authors: Francisco J Marco-Gracia (Universidad de Zaragoza and Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón), Víctor A Luque de Haro (Universidad de Almería and Centro de Investigación Mediterráneo de Economía y Desarrollo Sostenible) and Pablo Delgado (Universidad de Zaragoza and Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón) In early-twentieth-century urban Spain, family structure had long-lasting consequences. Using longitudinal data from Zaragoza, we show […]
Capital and Coercion: Why Slavery Persisted after Britain Banned the Trade
Author: Igor Martins (Lund University) In 1807, Britain outlawed the slave trade across its empire. Yet in the Cape Colony, households continued accumulating slaves for decades afterwards. New evidence from digitised tax censuses suggests the answer lies not in labour demand, but in the financial value of enslaved people as capital assets. A supply shock […]
Tax Farming and State Capacity: Evidence from Colonial Indonesia
Author: Mark Hup (Chinese University of Hong Kong) How and why did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? Prior to centralized tax collection by state actors, tax collection by private parties – tax farming – was widespread. What then drove the use of tax farming as well as its eventual replacement by state-run tax collection? […]