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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]

Isabella Ou, I University of Minnesota i , and Evan Roberts, I University of Minnesota i Origins of a Violent Land: The Role of Migration There is substantial variation in violent crime rates across the US - can cultural differences explain this? Explaining Gender Differences in the Selection and Sorting of Migrants: Evidence from Canada-... This paper uses newly digitized border crossing records from 1906 to 1954 and US census data to study the selection and sorting of migrants from Canada to the United States. David Escamilla-Guerrero, I University of St. Andrews i , Miko Lepistö, I University of Helsinki i , and Chris Minns, I London School of Economics i Return Innovation: Evidence from the English Migration to the United States, 1850-1940 What drives the direction of innovation? Andrea Bernini, I University of Oxford i , Giovanni Facchini, I University of Nottingham i , Marco Tabellini, I Harvard Business School i , and Cecilia Testa, I University of Nottingham i The Power of Narratives: Anti-Black Attitudes and Violence in the US South Systematic discrimination and violence against minorities are enduring phenomena. [Extracted from the article]

Antonio Iodice, I University of Exeter and University of Genoa i SESSION 2: HISTORICAL LABOR MARKETS The Economics of Gender-Specific Minimum-Wage Legislation During the 1910s, twelve U.S. states passed and implemented the country's first minimum-wage laws. First, where rivers shift states form, and existing states expand their capacity. Lee J. Alston, I Indiana University i , Marie Duggan, I Keene State College i , and Julio Ramos, I Pennsylvania State University i SESSION 11: FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT Financing Industrialization in Russia and Germany A large literature debates what system best promotes the accumulation and allocation of capital, especially in late-industrializing countries, where capital market imperfections may be severe. In contrast, this paper leverages detailed firm-level data from late 19th-century Sweden showing that a sharp increase in industrial tariffs has a heterogeneous impact across firms: Initially low-productivity firms see an increase in productivity while initially high-productive firms experience a decline. [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]

The Economic History Association announced the 2022 prize winners at the Annual Meeting held in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Paper proposals should include a 3-5-page proposal and a 150-word abstract suitable for publication in the I Journal of Economic History. i Paper proposals should be submitted by 31 January 31 2023, to ensure consideration. EHA GRANT AND FELLOWSHIP AWARDS The Committee on Research in Economic History (CREH) of the Economic History Association is charged with administrating the Association's project of assisting young scholars as a way of strengthening the discipline of economic history. [Extracted from the article]

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]

The Program Committee, chaired by Taylor Jaworski (University of Colorado), welcomes submissions on all subjects in economic history, though some preference will be given to papers that fit the theme of the conference. Papers should be submitted individually, but authors may suggest to the Committee that three particular papers fit well together in a panel. The Economic History Association announced the 2021 prize winners at the Annual Meeting held in Tucson, Arizona. [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 proposes a novel approach to assessing the efficiency and distributional consequences of occupational licensing statutes during the Gilded and Progressive eras, based on the practice of judicial review. At the time, state judges ruling on the constitutionality of police powers regulation operated under powerful legal norms that militated against redistribution and class legislation. Evidence presented in the paper strongly suggests that judges were significantly more likely to uphold, on constitutional grounds, occupational licensing legislation for occupations with important information asymmetries, suggesting that constitutional review promoted efficiency in occupational markets. These findings have implications for current policies regarding occupational licensing. [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 shows that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 broadened access to Parliament for families needing rights to sell land in so-called estate bills. Bills were on average 14–27 percentage points more likely to be for gentry families and not aristocratic families in legislative sessions after the Revolution compared to sessions before. Regression and archival evidence suggest that parliamentary certainty was primarily responsible for improved access by altering families' entry calculus and brokers' recruitment of new business. More broadly, the paper provides insight into the ways in which political institutions affect access to and the provision of property rights. [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]

The Economic History Association announced the winners of various prizes at their Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Notable winners include Cormac O'Grada and Morgan Kelly for the Arthur H. Cole Prize, Hannah Postel for the Allan Nevins Prize, Lukas Rosenberger for the Alexander Gerschenkron Prize, Carol Heim for the Jonathan Hughes Prize, Leigh Gardner for the Lindert-Williamson Prize, David Todd for the Gyorgy Ranki Prize, Price Fishback for the Gallman-Parker Prize, James Fenske for Excellence in Refereeing, and James Kung for Exceptional Service. The association also announced the theme for their 2024 meeting, which will focus on globalization throughout history. Additionally, they awarded grants and fellowships to young scholars in the field of economic history. [Extracted from the article]

As a multi-faceted socio-political movement in twentieth-century China, the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) witnessed conflict and social upheaval. This paper investigates its economic legacies, exploiting geographic variation in revolutionary intensity, measured by the number of resulting deaths. Using a newly assembled county-level panel dataset over five decades, we find worse-affected areas performed slightly better at baseline, but were slower to industrialize. This effect was large in the early 1980s before diminishing to become insignificant by 2000. Using individual-level census data, we find more-exposed cohorts are less likely to obtain higher education degrees and to work in professional and entrepreneurial occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the evolution of gender equality in Sweden during a phase characterized by industrialization, urbanization, and demographic transition. To this end, we build a database with quantitative indicators to construct a spatial Historical Gender Gap Index. We find that after a period of stagnation, Sweden made significant progress in closing the gender gap from the 1940s onward to reach the high level of gender equality that it is now famous for. The empirical exploration of the relationship between gender equality and economic development reveals that regions displaying higher gender equality performed economically better than less gender-equal regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure property rights are usually considered to be essential for sustained economic development. In England, it is debated whether property rights have been secure since the medieval period or if they were only established after the Glorious Revolution. In this context, the paper examines the Court of Wards, which from 1540 to 1646 administered the Crown's right to take custody of children and their lands when these were held by feudal-military tenures. The paper shows that wardship was a common occurrence, its exactions arbitrary but often heavy, and that it reduced the value of lands held by these tenures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the patterns of technology transfer from Britain to France during the early phases of industrializing using a dataset comprising all patents granted in France in the period 1791–1844. Exploiting the peculiarities of French legislation, we construct an array of patent quality indicators and investigate their determinants. We find that patents filed by British inventors or French inventors with personal connections to British inventors were of relatively higher quality. Overall, our results show that the French innovation system was capable of attracting and effectively absorbing key technologies from Britain. [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]

This paper estimates the causal impact of short-term aggregate fluctuations in Egypt, 1911–48, using global cotton price shocks. Firm entry was procyclical, and exit was acyclical. There were persistent differences between cohorts over the cycle; expansionary cohorts were of lower quality. The evidence supports models of firm entry with ex-ante heterogeneity. The findings highlight the extensive margin of entry as the primary adjustment mechanism. As a result, recessions had a strong "isolation" effect. This nature of firm entry amplified and propagated temporary price shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy's postwar economic development. It exploits differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could modernize their infrastructure more quickly experienced higher increases in agricultural production, especially for perishable crops. In the same provinces, we observe larger investments in labor-saving machines, the entry of more firms into the industrial sector, and a larger expansion of the industrial and service workforces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where Black officeholders were attacked have the largest tax reversions. This provides the first quantitative evidence that Reconstruction political violence was specifically related to Black political efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alfred Marshall argued that the malaise of public companies in Edwardian Britain was due to the separation of ownership from control and a lack of professional management. In this paper, we examine the ownership and control of the c.1,700 largest British companies in 1911. We find that most public companies had a separation of ownership and control, but that this had little effect on their performance. We also find that manager characteristics that proxy for amateurism are uncorrelated with performance. Ultimately, our evidence suggests that, if Marshall was correct in identifying a corporate malaise in Britain, its source lay elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dublin experienced a marked stagnation in population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, accompanied by decaying infrastructure and poor public health. Historians have emphasized that this crisis was coupled with poor governance of the city of Dublin—manifested by eroding public services together with increasing tax burdens to counteract growing debt. This paper studies the municipal boundary expansion of Dublin in 1901, which occurred as a way to alleviate the city's financial distress. It saw multiple relatively wealthy townships annexed by the city via royal order to increase Dublin's tax base. Using a sample of census records matched to city streets, we show that wealthy residents and Protestant residents were more likely to leave annexed areas compared to areas that remained independent. Moreover, we offer anecdotal evidence that at least some of the wealthy Protestant households departing annexed townships sorted into jurisdictions that remained independent. Our findings offer support to arguments that the municipal annexation by the city of Dublin may have accelerated the decline of annexed areas in the early twentieth century and contributed to municipal fragmentation in metropolitan Dublin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates part-year factory operation, a common but understudied dimension of industrializing economies, in a prototypical late-industrializing setting that offers rich factory-level data: Imperial Russia. Newly compiled data provides detailed descriptions of all Russian manufacturing firms operating in 1894 and shows that factories operating a greater number of annual working days were more mechanized, more urban, more likely to employ women and children, more productive, and more likely to survive. Rather than arguing that part-year operation demonstrated Russia's uniquely inexorable backwardness, we stress operating time's relationship to fundamental drivers of growth, including urbanization, geography, and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the average and heterogeneous effects of railway access on parish-level population, income, and industrialization in Württemberg during the Industrial Revolution. We show that the growth-enhancing effect of the railway was much greater in parishes that were larger and more industrial at the outset. However, such early industrial parishes were rare in the relatively poor German state. This might explain why we find small average growth effects, which only increase at the end of the nineteenth century. Heterogeneity in the impact of the railway thus increased economic disparities within Württemberg and contributed to the state's relatively sluggish growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Journal of Economic History has issued a correction notice for an article titled "Internal Borders and Population Geography in the Unification of Italy." The correction addresses an error in the listing of a coauthor for a paper referenced in the article. The correct reference is provided, and the editors and publisher apologize for any confusion caused. The correction notice is reported by Brian A'Hearn and Valeria Rueda. [Extracted from the article]

This paper investigates the impact of the abolition of the civil service exam on local governance in early twentieth-century China. Before the abolition, local elites collected surtaxes that financed local public goods, but they were supervised by the state and could lose candidacy for higher status if they engaged in corrupt behavior. This prospect of upward mobility (POUM) gave them incentives to behave well, which the abolition of the exam removed. Using anti-elite protests as a proxy for the deterioration of local governance, we find that prefectures with a higher POUM experienced more incidents of anti-elite protests after the abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the nineteenth century, U.S. manufacturers shifted away from the "hand labor" mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to "machine labor," which was increasingly concentrated in steam-powered factories. This transition fundamentally changed production tasks, jobs, and job requirements. This paper uses digitized data on these two production modes from an 1899 U.S. Commissioner of Labor report to estimate the frequency and impact of the use of inanimate power on production operation times. About half of production operations were mechanized; the use of inanimate power raised productivity, accounting for about one-quarter to one-third of the overall productivity advantage of machine labor. However, additional factors, such as the increased division of labor and adoption of high-volume production, also played quantitatively important roles in raising productivity in machine production versus by hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have reported results based on populations for every country in the world for the past two thousand years. The source, McEvedy and Jones' Atlas of World Population History , includes many estimates that are little more than guesses and that do not reflect research since 1978. McEvedy and Jones often infer population sizes from their view of a particular economy, making their estimates poor proxies for economic growth. Their rounding means their measurement error is not "classical." Some economists augment that error by disaggregating regions in unfounded ways. Econometric results that rest on McEvedy and Jones are unreliable. "... we haven't just pulled the figures out of the sky. Well, not often." —McEvedy and Jones (1978, p. 11) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were more likely to be Democrats and voted more conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county's propensity to elect former slave owners was positively correlated with cotton production, but negatively with Reconstruction-era progress of blacks. Counties that elected more slave owners also displayed worse educational outcomes for blacks in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1942 more than 110,000 persons of Japanese origin living on the U.S. West Coast were forcibly sent away to ten internment camps for one to three years. This paper studies how internees' careers were affected in the long run. Combining Census data, camp records, and survey data, I develop a predictor of a person's internment status based on Census observables. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that internment had long-run positive effects on earnings. The evidence is consistent with mechanisms related to increased mobility due to re-optimization of occupation and location choices, possibly facilitated by camps' high economic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China―an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and Chinese scientific works, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits stimulated Confucian literati to study science. On average, the literati's scientific works increased four times in prefectures with Jesuit scientists after 1580. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the emperor of China in 1723. Since China's scholar-official system remained unchanged, the literati's scientific research aimed to serve the needs of statecraft rather than translating into economic progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the German principality of Hesse-Cassel in the 1850s, comparing inheritance institutions and landholding inequality for roughly a thousand mostly agricultural villages and towns. The principality lay between impartible northern Europe and the partible southwest. Inequality in landholding size is measured, showing an average Gini of 0.615 and substantial variation across communities. Places with relatively larger populations and ones that practiced impartible inheritance had mostly higher wealth inequality. The main result is that inheritance norms played a role in causing higher landholding inequality. Higher emigration rates in the impartible communities helped to alleviate landholding inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test for integration of financial markets in China during 1920-1933 using a new dataset of domestic exchange rates. Our data concerns tael-denominated telegraphic transfers between Shanghai and nine other cities. We find that Chinese financial markets, as measured by the efficiency of silver-point arbitrage, were highly integrated among major commercial hubs in north and central China, but there was a lower level of integration for more remote cities in the south. Our paper presents the first comprehensive assessment of the efficiency of the Chinese silver standard and contributes to a revaluation of market performance during pre-communist China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the evolution of mate preferences throughout the twentieth century in France. I digitized all the matrimonial ads published in France's best-selling monthly magazine from 1928 to 1994. Using dictionary-based methods, I show that mate preferences were mostly stable during the Great Depression, WWII, and the ensuing economic boom. These preferences started transforming in the late 1960s when economic criteria were progressively replaced by personality criteria. The timing coincides with profound family and demographic changes in French society. These findings suggest that, in the search for a long-term partner, non-material needs have replaced material ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine's annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that the representative POW's productivity averaged 32 percent of the representative regular miner's productivity and that POWs' contribution to wartime coal output amounted to 3.9 percent. Violence did not serve as a powerful work incentive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flightiness, or depositor sensitivity to liquidity needs, can be an important determinant of financial distress. I leverage institutional differences—that attract depositors with varying flightiness—across building and loan associations in California during the Great Depression. A new type of plan, the Dayton plan, involved less restrictive savings plans and lower withdrawal penalties. Dayton plans in California were more likely to close during the Great Depression. Archival evidence on lending rates and returns supports the flightiness mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the role of denominational competition in the expansion of higher education in the nineteenth-century United States. We document that nearly all colleges established in this period were affiliated with a Christian denomination. Empirical analysis reveals a robust positive relationship between the denominational fragmentation of the county and the number of colleges established. We take several steps to rule out competing explanations and also highlight the causal channel by utilizing two historical case studies. We conclude by estimating a model of school choice and showing that students exhibited strong preferences to attend same-denominational colleges in terms of willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-travel. Therefore, we argue that religious diversity softened the extent of tuition competition between institutions and precipitated an "excess" entry of schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on mortality and economic activity across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The combination of fast and stringent NPIs reduced peak mortality by 50 percent and cumulative excess mortality by 24 to 34 percent. However, while the pandemic itself was associated with short-run economic disruptions, we find that these disruptions were similar across cities with strict and lenient NPIs. NPIs also did not worsen medium-run economic outcomes. Our findings indicate that NPIs can reduce disease transmission without further depressing economic activity, a finding also reflected in discussions in contemporary newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. military production during World War II increased at an impressive rate and led to large declines in unit costs. However, the literature has focused on elucidating detailed mechanisms behind this relationship, using small datasets on specific products. Here we take a step back and, looking at an unprecedently large collection of data, we show that both exogenous technological progress and endogenous effects from increasing production experience were important, in roughly similar proportions. The demand for military products was largely exogenous, and the correlation between production, cumulative production, and time was weak, limiting issues of reverse causality and multicollinearity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Classical Gold Standard period, with high capital mobility and fixed-exchange rates, is usually seen as the extreme case of international constraints on monetary policy. Contrary to this view, we show how central bank balance sheets offset the effects of international shocks on domestic interest rates. In contrast, in the United States, a gold standard country without a central bank, the reaction of money market rates was two to four times stronger than that of interest rates in countries with a central bank. Our study is based on the monthly balance sheets of all central banks in the world (i.e., 21) from 1891–1913. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]