By Daniel Gallardo Albarrán (Wageningen University, @DanielGalAlb) and Herman de Jong (Groningen University) blog post based on the article, “Optimism or pessimism? A composite view on English living standards during the Industrial Revolution “, available on EHER here. Introduction The consequences of industrialization for the living standards of the mass of the population have been intensively […]
Changing Places: The Spatial Dispersion of U.S. Manufacturing during the 20th Century
Nicholas Crafts and Alexander Klein We provide new estimates of changes in the spatial concentration of U.S. manufacturing from 1880 to 2007. The average level across all industries fell by more than half over the period. Creative destruction has had a strong spatial component which eroded the manufacturing belt and when compounded by globalization left […]
Intergenerational mobility: what about the daughters?
by Vincent Delabastita*^ and Erik Buyst* *Department of Economics, KU Leuven^Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) blog post based on the article, “Intergenerational mobility of sons and daughters: evidence from nineteenth-century West Flanders”, now available on EHER early view here Research of the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic attainment has long had a restrictive focus on the relationship […]
Comparing Income and Wealth Inequality in Pre-Industrial Economies: the case of Castile (Spain), c. 1750
by Esteban Nicolini and Fernando Ramos-Palencia (@framospalencia) blog post based on the article, “Comparing income and wealth inequality in pre-industrial economies: the case of Castile (Spain) in the eighteenth century”, available on EHER early view here. Our knowledge of the evolution of economic inequality within countries in pre-industrial Europe has expanded considerably in the […]
Call for submissions: FIFTH EREH FAST TRACK MEETING, December 2020.
The previous fast track meetings were held in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2017 in Paris, Lisbon and London, organized by the European Historical Economics Society and the editors of the European Review of Economic History. They resulted in the publication of several high-quality papers in the European Review of Economic History. The idea of the […]
The Past’s Long Shadow: Network analysis of Economic History
Author: Gregori Galofré-Vilà (Postdoctoral Researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona Institute of Political Economy and Governance). This column uses network analysis to review the development of economic history over the last 40 years. It shows how economic historians are interconnected through their research, which scholars are most cited by their peers, and the main […]
Secular stagnation and the global surge in house prices
by Julius Probst The decline in global real interest rates Back in 2013, Larry Summers started to believe that most advanced economies have entered a new macroeconomic regime, a prolonged period of lower economic growth as a result of insufficient aggregate demand. In a recent piece, I argued that Summers’ revival of the secular stagnation […]
Sex ratios and missing girls in 19th-century Greece
By Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia and Michail Raftakis The “missing girls” phenomenon, arising from discriminatory practices that result in excess female mortality early in life, has been especially dramatic in China and India. Analyzing sex ratios, the number of boys per hundred girls, in 19th-century Europe, recent researchsuggests that these practices could have also been […]
“Cholera Forcing” and the Urban Water Infrastructure: Lessons from Historical Berlin
Kalle Kappner Over the last decade, the role of modern water supply and sewage disposal infrastructure in the West’s 19th and early 20th century urban mortality transition has attracted renewed attention among economic historians and development economists (Harris and Helgertz, 2019). A robust conclusion of this literature is that access to tap water and sanitary […]
From West to East: Bolivian regional GDPs since the 1950s
José Peres-Cajías Universitat de Barcelona The political disruption that is taking place worldwide during the last years has prompted the proliferation of analyses (in academia and beyond) that link current vote decisions with particular regional economic and political legacies. Economic historians can offer critical insights to this public debate and the reconstruction of regional GDPs […]