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The Bureau du Commerce allocated rights and rents to private entrepreneurs via a mix of hierarchical division of labor and peer-based collegial deliberation. This set-up reflected an attempt to maximize information and expertise, but also allowed for the recognition of private rights and social interests. The final decisions of the Bureau (for or against each demand), and the qualitative arguments brought forward during the procedure, are robust predictors of eventual decisions. We see this result as an indication that impersonal, rational and informed decision-making could be obtained even within a patrimonialist, rent-seeking State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Waterloo, managing French public finances represented a daunting task as the country had lost a substantial part of its population and territory and had to pay huge amounts as reparations to the victors. Despite this, in just ten years, France managed to issue substantial amounts of debt with a spread, compared to the British consol, falling from more than 400 to 100 basis points. We argue that the Duke of Wellington was key in creating an environment in which Baring had an incentive to lend to France and all actors had an incentive to see French debts reimbursed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Measurement of the value of “media capture” (the control of newspapers by business or political interests) is difficult. However, if capture is valuable, it should affect the price of newspaper shares. Useful information about the value of media capture should be retrievable from Stock Exchange data. Interwar France provides a unique setting to implement this idea because key newspapers floated voting and nonvoting stocks. Combined with takeover prices, data yield estimates of the price of media capture and of the time-series evolution of this price. Comparison with Britain sheds new light on a dark episode of French history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study establishes long-term trends in the purchasing power of the wages of unskilled workers and develops estimates for GDP per capita for medieval Egypt and Iraq. Wages were heavily influenced by two long-lasting demographic shocks, the Justinian Plague and the Black Death and the slow population recovery that followed. As a result, they remained above the subsistence minimum for most of the medieval era. We also argue that the environment of high wages that emerged after the Justinian Plague contributed to the Golden Age of Islam by creating demand for higher income goods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts of posters presented at the Economic History Association's 2012 annual meeting on topics including the history of fiscal policy in France, the history of education in China, and trade globalization.

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers' reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from contemporary sources.“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything. Eulogy is invariably dull—a fact that Mr. Alf had discovered and utilized.”A. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875“And did you threaten him with the newspapers?”H. de Balzac, La maison Nucingen, 1837 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article tests whether smaller domestic markets can explain why France industrialized more slowly than Britain. To do so, it uses the Tableaux du Maximum. It begins by presenting this source and then checks if the data from the source are plausible using a logit theoretical gravity equation. The results of this gravity equation are then employed to compute the expected market size of specific supply centers. Even if differences in real, nominal, and disposable income are taken into account, some French supply centers had access to domestic markets that were larger than the whole of Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupation charges paid by France to Nazi Germany represent one of the largest international transfers and contributed significantly to the German war effort. We employ a neoclassical growth mode! that incorporates essential features of the occupied economy to assess the welfare costs of the policies that managed the payments to Germany. Our lower bound estimates show that occupation payments required a severe cut in consumption, A draft of labor to Germany and a reduction of real wages added to this burden. Management of the accumulated domestic debt required large budget surpluses; but post-Liberation inflation slashed the real debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document how intermediaries shaped markets or, conversely, how market institutions constrained intermediaries. In Dijon, where the Estates of Burgundy's debt amounted to nearly half of all bonds in that small market, there was limited need for intermediaries. In the 1740s the borrowing needs of the province expanded, and the estates began to borrow in Paris, where their debt remained a small fraction of the market, and where they relied on notaries to place their bonds and to create a secondary market. These developments assured the estates' capacity to borrow and thus Burgundian autonomy from the French Crown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers a new quantitative history of the market for government debt in France from 1746-1793, before the Revolution. How the monarchy was a persistent default risk; The observable rules that default followed in targeting specific assets; How the financial market reflected on interest rates.

Examines the rhythms of production in the Montgolfier paper mill, one of the largest in eighteenth-century France. View of historians on early industrial work; What Montgolfier output registers reveal.

Examines the important market for private perpetual annuities (rentes) and bills obligatory (obligations) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, France. Obstacles confronting the study of the rentes and obligations in long-term private credit; Impact of redistribution; Growth of the long-term private capital in the eighteenth-century.

Analyzes the changing relations between the major men's and women's guilds in the Paris, France clothing trades, the norms that governed those relations and the socio-economic forces that reshaped them in 18th-century. Tailors; Linen drapers; Seamstresses; Clandestine production; Corporate order; Debates about women's labor.

Presents the summary of a dissertation that looks at two previously proposed explanations for France's relatively slow industrialization. Immobility of the labor force; Small size of establishments; Industrial labor demand facing an inelastic labor supply; Wage gaps in the second half of the 19th-century; Sensitivity of interdepartment migration to wages; Link between market size and economic growth.

Uses wage gaps between farm and city to assess whether industrialization in late nineteenth-century France was choked off by peasants' alleging reluctance to move. The landless agricultural labor force; The size of wage gaps; The wage gap trend, rural emigration, and urbanization.

Argues for a distinction between offset by declining cost and induced by declining profits of price deflation. Proximate cause of deflation in France; Keyne's theoretical contribution of the depression experience into the heart of economic theory.