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This document contains abstracts of papers presented at an academic conference. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to economics, history, and social development. Each paper presents empirical evidence and analysis to shed light on specific phenomena or historical events. The research is conducted using different methodologies and data sources, providing valuable insights into these complex subjects. The summaries provide a brief overview of each paper's main findings and contribute to the understanding of various social and economic phenomena. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which contributes to the existing literature that focuses on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally, we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure that can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. We provide three methods for using this secondary variable to deal with non-classical measurement error in a binary treatment: set identification, bias reduction via sample restriction, and a parametric bias correction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by replicating four recent economic history papers. Relative to the initial analyses, our results yield markedly larger coefficient estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a program for the 2023 Economic History Association meetings, which acknowledges the individuals and organizations involved in the event's success. It also provides information about the upcoming 2024 meeting, which will focus on the theme of "Globalization: Perspectives from the Past." The document includes a list of research papers that will be presented in various sessions, covering a wide range of topics such as trade costs, institutions and labor markets, state building and reform, race in the U.S., science and knowledge diffusion, and more. These papers offer valuable insights into different aspects of history and social movements, making them relevant for library patrons conducting research on these specific topics. [Extracted from the article]

This paper estimates the migratory and fertility effects of the federal Relocation Program, which attempted to move Native American individuals to urban areas under the promises of financial assistance and job training. I find the Relocation Program increased the Native American population in the target cities by more than 100,000 people. I also find that second- and third-generation Native American women living in cities have a 50 percent lower fertility rate than those living in areas with historically large Native American populations. These findings indicate that this program meaningfully shifted the spatial distribution of the Native American population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the worship of ancient wisdom affects economic progress in historical China, where the learned class embraced classical wisdom for millennia but encountered the shock of Western industrial influence in the mid-nineteenth century. Using the number of sage temples to measure the strength of classical worship in 269 prefectures, I find that classical worship discouraged intellectuals from appreciating modern learning and thus inhibited industrialization between 1858 and 1927. By contrast, industrialization grew faster in regions less constrained by classicism. This finding implies the importance of cultural entrepreneurship, or the lack thereof, in shaping modern economic growth. "The humor of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning." —David Hume (1754, p. 464). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of the expansion of mass schooling and the long-term legacy of educational institutions. Based on a new provincial-level dataset for Italy in the period 1861–1911, we argue that different models of schooling provision adopted by the different pre-unification polities influenced primary-education organizations across macro-regions up to WWI. As a result, school access and the capability to generate literacy given current rates of enrollment differed substantially, with the Northern regions aiming to increase schooling for all, while the Center and the South implemented a more elitist model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship contends that ancient Mediterranean economies grew intensively. An explanation is that Smithian growth was spurred by reductions in transaction costs and increased trade flows. This paper argues that an ancient Greek institution, proxenia , was among the key innovations that allowed such growth in the period 500–0 BCE. Proxenia entailed a Greek city-state declaring a foreigner to be its "public friend," a status that conferred both duties and privileges. The functions performed by "public friends" could facilitate economic transactions between communities. Accordingly, network and regression analyses establish a strong relationship between proxenia grants and trade intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides summaries of several doctoral dissertations in the field of economic history. The first dissertation focuses on Chinese immigration and exclusion in the United States, challenging previous assumptions and highlighting the impact of anti-Chinese laws. The second dissertation explores expanding financial participation in the early 20th century, examining employee stock ownership programs and the impact of the Liberty Loan Program during World War I. The third dissertation examines disparities in access to opportunity in the United States, particularly focusing on the intergenerational effects of anti-Black institutions. These dissertations contribute valuable data, methods, and findings to their respective fields of study. Another dissertation explores various aspects of inequality in America, focusing on racial and gender disparities in access to opportunity. Lastly, a dissertation focuses on the drivers of labor market inequalities throughout economic history, examining intergenerational mobility and the impact of the feudal system. [Extracted from the article]

Economists ignore caring labor since most is provided unpaid. Disregard is unjust, theoretically indefensible, and probably misleading. Valuation requires estimates of time spent and the replacement or opportunity costs of that time. I use the maintenance costs of British workers, costs which cover both the material inputs into upkeep and the domestic services needed to turn commodities into livings, to isolate the costs of paid domestic labor. I then impute the value of unpaid domestic labor from these market equivalents, and aggregate across households without domestic servants. Historically, unpaid domestic labor represented c. 20 percent of total income, a contribution that suggests the need to revise some standard narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Industrial Removal Office funded 39,000 Jewish households to leave enclave neighborhoods in New York City from 1900 to 1922. Compared to neighbors with the same baseline occupation, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after relocation. These gains persisted to the next generation. Benefits increased with more years spent outside of an enclave. Participants were more likely to speak English, and married spouses with less Jewish names. More Jewishly-identified men (as measured by own names) were more likely to return to the city. We contextualize these results with new national evidence on Jewish economic and cultural assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the impact of urban political structure on preindustrial wealth inequality? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher inequality in a panel of early-modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that macro-relationship, I construct a unique individual-level panel dataset on personal wealth and political office-holding in the city-state of Nördlingen (1579–1700). I employ a difference-in-differences setting to show that political elites enriched themselves substantially, increasing inequality. To address endogeneity concerns, I exploit the Thirty-Years' War as a shock to elites' potential for enrichment from public office. Officials manipulated this crisis to enrich themselves further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study art markets in the Greco-Roman world to explore the origins of artistic innovations in classical Greece and the mass production of imitative works in the Roman Empire. Economic factors may have played a role, on one side fostering product innovations when a few rival Greek city-states competed, outbidding each other to obtain higher-quality artworks, and on the other side fostering process innovations when a large integrated market promoted art trade across the Mediterranean Sea. The evidence on art prices is consistent with this. Literary evidence on classical Greek painting from V–III centuries BC (largely from Pliny the Elder) shows that the real price of masterpieces increased up to the peak of creativity reached with Apelles. Epigraphic evidence on Roman sculpture from I–III centuries AD (largely from inscriptions at the base of statues) shows that the real price of statues was stable and largely equalized across the imperial provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that captures the notion that consumption by ordinary citizens poses a status threat to ruling elites. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income—sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face a greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a new dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws. It is unfortunately an established fact that both men and womenfolk have, in utterly irresponsible manner, driven extravagance in dress and new styles to such shameful and wanton extremes that the different classes are barely to be known apart. —Nuremberg Ordnance of 1657, Quoted in Hunt (1996) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Editors' Report for 2023 of the Journal of Economic History provides an overview of the editorial team and their roles, as well as acknowledging the contributions of the Editorial Board and referees. It highlights the increase in the journal's impact factor over the past five years, indicating the quality of the published articles and growing interest in economic history. The report includes tables and graphs displaying submission and publication rates, as well as response time statistics. It concludes with tables showing the distribution of submissions by era, topic, and region. The text also mentions the importance of book reviews and encourages authors to send copies of new books to the relevant book review editor. It also mentions a policy requiring authors to post data and replication files for accepted articles to ensure transparency and scholarly integrity. [Extracted from the article]

I analyze factory worker households in the early 1920s in Osaka to examine idiosyncratic income shocks and consumption. Using the household-level monthly panel dataset, I find that while households could not fully cope with idiosyncratic income shocks at that time, they mitigated fluctuations in indispensable consumption during economic hardship. In terms of risk-coping mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence that savings institutions helped mitigate vulnerabilities and that both using borrowing institutions and adjusting labor supply served as risk-coping strategies among households with less savings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to a dearth of data, nineteenth century lending to sovereign borrowers was a blind date. We argue this is the reason for collateral pledges found in contemporary lending covenants, which enabled not execution, but the production of reliable fiscal data. Lawyers injected collateral clauses in sovereign debt covenants to permit credible disclosure of hard-to-access tax data. The study foregrounds the importance of big law firms as financial intermediaries and information producers. It also contributes a new view on the role played by contracts in sovereign debt. "No [underwriting] firm can take precautions against the repudiation of a [sovereign] hypothecation." —Thomas Baring, 1865 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain from 1905–1945. We find that the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the reasons for this shift through a natural language processing method, which allows us to leverage expert opinion to track specific issues in our newspaper archives. We find a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues like socio-economic conflict. This holds even when exploiting content differences between the two newspapers in our corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1965 Immigration Act represented a radical shift in U.S. policy, which has been credited with dramatically expanding the volume and changing the composition of immigration. Its passing has often been described as the result of political machinations negotiated within Congress without regard to public opinion. We show that congressional voting was consistent with public opinion on abolishing the country-of-origin quotas but not with the desire to limit the volume of immigration. While the former initially reflected attitudes toward civil rights, the latter is consistent with contemporary expectations that the expansion in numbers would be modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Financial Innovation and Resilience: A Comparative Perspective on the Public Banks of Naples (1462–1808)" is a book that highlights the historical significance of the Historical Archive of the Bank of Naples, which houses the largest collection of banking records in the world. The book explores the Neapolitan system of public banking and its role in the development of modern banking. It also compares the Neapolitan banks to other banking systems in Europe and discusses broader topics such as long-term banking development, financial innovations, and the role of fiscal concerns in shaping credit markets. The book aims to bring attention to the history of early modern Neapolitan banking and challenge the historiographical bias that has neglected Southern European history. [Extracted from the article]

"The Legacy of the Global Financial Crisis" is a book edited by Youssef Cassis and Jean-Jacques van Helten that examines the lessons learned from the 2008 financial crisis. The book takes an applied history approach, aiming to provide analytical rigor to historical parallels and analogies used by policy makers. It features contributions from academics, practitioners, policy makers, and journalists, with chapters focusing on specific policy domains, country experiences, and disciplinary perspectives. While the book offers valuable insights, some chapters are more derivative and can be skipped. Overall, it serves as a launch document and manifesto for Cassis's larger project on financial crises and global risk. [Extracted from the article]