Authors: Peter M. Scott and Karina Pavlisa The “industrialisation of the home” is one of the most important economic and social revolutions in the 20thcentury, reducing the time (and especially the effort) of housework and enabling married women to plan for long-term careers. However, it is difficult to disentangle their impacts from other factors – […]

Author: Antoninus M. Samy Abstract: The Edwardian property slump, a significant yet underexplored event in British economic history, saw a dramatic decline in house prices in London between 1900 and 1914. This blog summarises the findings of a recent study by Antoninus M. Samy that uses novel data sources to shed light on the extent and […]

Author: Marcos Castillo Why Did Swedish Immigrants to the U.S. Earn So Much More than Stayers in Sweden? New evidence on the economic returns to migration during the Age of Mass Migration Ingress: During the Age of Mass Migration, over a million Swedes left their homeland in search of better lives in the United States. […]

Author: Tamer Güven (Abdullah Gul University) Why did wages in Ottoman state textile factories stagnate in the second half of the nineteenth century? In Ottoman economic history, Pamuk (2000) constructed a wage series for skilled and unskilled construction workers, and Ergene (1998) did the same for agricultural workers. However, despite numerous studies that have touched […]

Author: Éric Gómez-i-Aznar Introduction How was human capital measured in pre-industrial societies? What role did practical skills, such as arithmetic, play in the economy and society of the time? These questions are key to understanding the foundations of industrialisation in Catalonia, a pioneering region in the southern European context. My article, published in The European […]

Authors: Alessandro Brioschi (Queen’s University Belfast) and Mattia Fochesato (Bocconi University) Why did income inequality vary in pre-industrial Europe? What affected the returns to human capital formation? How did geographic, institutional, demographic, and economic factors interplay in the determination of the wage differentials? Economic historians have long debated the factors that drove differences in wage […]

Authors: Louis Henderson and Moritz Kaiser Earlier this year, Americans elected a president who promised to enact steep tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing. Rapid changes to trade policy followed, and at the time of writing, U.S. imports and exports face an effective tariff rate of approximately 30 per cent, a nearly ten-fold increase relative to […]

Authors: Guglielmo Barone, David Chilosi, Carlo Ciccarelli, Guido de Blasio Italy was unified in 1861. The country’s unification was the result of the Italian Risorgimento, the political and social movement that developed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic era and culminated in the consolidation of the existing states into the Kingdom of Italy (Banti and […]

Authors: Roberto Rondinelli, Maria Carmela Schisani, Giancarlo Ragozini This paper investigates the historical roots of business familism in Southern Italy. Using a social network analysis and employing surnames as proxies for family ties, we introduce and explore various measures of business familism. Our analysis reveals that the persistent embeddedness of firms in family ties was […]

Authors: Guadalupe Souto, Alfonso Herranz-Loncán, Sergio Espuelas, Gemma Abio, Ció Patxot Countries strongly differ on the age orientation of their welfare states. While in some cases the benefits of different social programs are biased towards protecting the elderly, in others they are more equally distributed among different age groups. The reasons for those differences have […]