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This article addresses two questions. First, when and to what extent did capital markets integrate north and south of the Alps? Second, how mobile was capital? Analysing a unique new dataset on pre-modern urban annuities, we find that northern markets were consistently better integrated than Italian markets. Long-term integration was driven by initially peripheral places in the Netherlands and Upper Germany integrating with the rest of the Holy Roman Empire where the distance and volume of inter-urban investments grew primarily in the sixteenth century. The institutions of the Empire contributed to stronger market integration north of the Alps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the effect of age at arrival for immigrant outcomes with a new dataset of arrivals linked to the 1940 U.S. Census. Using within-family variation, we find that arriving at an older age, or having more childhood exposure to the European environment, led to a more negative wage gap relative to the native born. Infant arrivals had a positive wage gap relative to natives, in contrast to a negative gap for teenage arrivals. Therefore, a key determinant of immigrant outcomes during the Age of Mass Migration was the country of residence during critical periods of childhood development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I use new data on employment and job placements during WWII to characterize the wartime surge in female work and its subsequent impact on female employment in the United States. The geography of female wartime work was primarily driven by industrial mobilization, not drafted men’s withdrawal from local labor markets. After the war, returning veterans and sharp cutbacks in war-related industries displaced many new female entrants, despite interest in continued work. As a result, areas most exposed to wartime work show limited overall effects on female labor force participation in 1950 and only marginal increases in durables manufacturing employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the long-run relationship between the capital share in national income and top personal income shares. Using a newly constructed historical cross-country database on capital shares and top income data, we find evidence on a strong, positive link that has grown stronger over the past century. The connection is stronger in Anglo-Saxon countries, in the very top of the distribution, when top capital incomes predominate, when using distributed top national income shares, and when considering gross of depreciation capital shares. Out of-sample predictions of top shares using capital shares indicates several cases of over- or underestimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I analyzed the market of paintings in Florence and Italy (1285–1550). Hedonic regressions on real prices allowed me to advance evidence that the market was competitive and that an important determinant of artistic innovation was driven by economic incentives. Price differentials reflected quality differentials between painters as perceived at the time (whose proxy is the length of the biography of Vasari) and did not depend on regional destinations, as expected under monopolistic competition with free entry. An inverse-U relation between prices and age of execution is consistent with reputational theories of artistic effort, and prices increased since the 1420s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study estimates agency’s impact on sugar plantation productivity using a unique early nineteenth-century panel data set from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Results of fixed effects models, combined with a qualitative and quantitative analysis of potential endogeneity of the agency variable, provide no evidence that estates managed by agents were less productive than those managed by their owners. We discuss the results in the context of the historical and recent, revisionary, interpretations of agency, and the emergence of managerial hierarchies in the Atlantic economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of female workers in the 1940s focus on labor supply. We use the basics of supply and demand to measure the impact of WWII on the short- and medium-run demand for female workers in manufacturing. Demand rose for both salaried and production female workers during the war and then fell after the war. However, the post-war demands for both groups were substantially higher than before the war and higher than the levels that would have been reached had the demands followed a counterfactual growth path from the boom period in the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a new trade dataset showing that nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom comparable to other parts of the “global periphery.” A sharp rise in export prices in the five decades before the scramble (1835–1885) was followed by an equally impressive decline during the colonial era. This study revises the view that the scramble for West Africa occurred when its major export markets were in decline and argues that the larger weight of West Africa in French imperial trade strengthened the rationale for French instead of British initiative in the conquest of the interior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using district population in Spain between 1860 and 1991, recorded approximately every decade, this article examines whether initial population affects subsequent population growth. While such a relationship between these two variables hardly existed during the second half of the nineteenth century, this link increased significantly between 1910 and 1970, although this trend was abruptly interrupted by the Civil War and the autarkic period that followed. The intensity of this relationship decreased in the 1970s, a process that continued during the 1980s. Our findings also stress that agglomeration economies were stronger in medium-size districts, especially from 1960 onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I find that childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, adversely impacted later-life human capital—especially when exposure was in utero—increasing poverty and disability rates, and decreasing fertility and college completion rates. The event's devastation of agriculture, however, had the beneficial effect of increasing high school completion, likely by pushing children who otherwise might have worked on the farm into secondary schooling. Lastly, New Deal spending helped remediate Dust Bowl damage, suggesting that timely and substantial policy interventions can aid in human recovery from natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1930 to 1960 rural communities, mainly in the U.S. South and Southwest, gained access to electricity. In addition to lights, the benefits included easier clothes washing, refrigeration, and pumped water. This article uses differences in the timing of electricity access across rural counties to study the effects on infant mortality and fertility. Rural electrification led to substantial reductions in infant mortality but had little effect on women's fertility. The increase in electricity access between 1930 and 1960 can account for 15 to 19 percent of the decline in rural infant mortality during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article creates a new database that covers all U.S. banks in the census years between 1870 and 1900 to test the interaction between inequality and financial development when the banking system was starting over from scratch. A fixed-effects panel regression shows that the number of banks per thousand people in the South has a strong positive relationship with the size of farm operations. This suggests that large southern farm operators welcomed new banks after the Civil War. When the analysis is extended into the 1900s, the relationship becomes more negative, as bankers may have tried to block entrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although recent studies on African colonial tax systems have deepened our understanding of early fiscal capacity building efforts in the region, they have largely ignored the contributions from a widely used but invisible source of state revenue: that of labor contributions. Exploiting data on corvée systems in French Africa, this is the first article to make these in-kind taxes “visible” by estimating a lower bound of how much they augmented governments' revenue base. Revealing that labor taxes constituted in most places the largest component of early colonial budgets, I argue that studies on historical taxation need to make a greater effort to integrate this significant source of government revenue into their analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported in Lloyd's Registers are shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new monthly index of the yields on junk bonds (high risk, high yield bonds) for the period 1910–1955. This index supplements the indexes of government bond yields, and Aaa and Baa corporate bond yields economic historians have relied on previously to describe the long-term risk spectrum. First, we describe our sources and methods. Then we show that our junk bond index contains information that is not in the closest alternative, and suggest some ways that the junk bond index could be used to enrich our understanding of the turbulent middle years of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the causes and variation of language standardization across European ethnic groups from a historical perspective. Although language has long garnered interest in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, how language becomes standardized has yet to be offered. In this article, I argue that the acquisition of the printing press is critical to explaining the occurrence and variation of standardization. Using the first publication of vernacular dictionaries as a proxy for standardization, I present a systematic investigation of the standardization process for 171 ethnic groups in Europe from 1400–2000 ce. Empirical tests come from an original data set that collects information on political, economic, and social dimensions. Findings from event history models show that (1) printing press adoption is positively and significantly correlated with vernacular dictionaries; and (2) early adopters are more likely to standardize vernaculars than latecomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I study the mobility and economic outcomes of European immigrants and their children in nineteenth-century Argentina, the second largest destination country during the Age of Mass Migration. I use new data linking males across censuses and passenger lists of arrivals to Buenos Aires. First-generation immigrants experienced faster occupational upgrading than natives. Occupational mobility was substantial relative to Europe; immigrants holding unskilled occupations upon arrival experienced high rates of occupational upgrading. Second-generation immigrants outperformed the sons of natives in terms of literacy, occupational status and access to property, and experienced higher rates of intergenerational mobility out of unskilled occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify the longest expansion in U.S. history, a recession-free 16-year period from 1841 to 1856 that we call America's First Great Moderation. Using newer data on industrial production, we show that the record-long expansion was primarily driven by a boom in transportation-goods investment following the discovery of gold in California. Furthermore, the low volatility of industrial production and stock returns during the First Great Moderation, which occurred during a period without a U.S. central bank, is similar to that observed for the Second Great Moderation (1984–2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we study the emergence of an extractive institution that hampered economic development in Italy for more than a century: the Sicilian mafia. Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the reasons behind the rise of the Sicilian mafia have remained a puzzle. In this article, we argue that the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind's discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More specifically, we claim that mafia appeared in locations where producers made high profits from citrus production for overseas export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the mafia protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881–1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry, we show that mafia presence is strongly related to the production of oranges and lemons. The results hold when different data sources and several controls are employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outside of the United States, few studies have estimated the effects of World War II service. In Australia, general war-time conscription and minimal involvement in the Korean War led to large cohort differences in military service rates, which we use for identification. We find a small, temporary negative effect on employment and a substantial positive effect on post-school qualifications, but not at the university level. While service increased home ownership slightly, it greatly reduced outright home ownership, consistent with the incentives provided by veterans' housing benefits. We also find a positive effect on marriage, but only from 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We trace the development of human capital in today's Senegal, Gambia, and Western Mali between 1770 and 1900. European trade, slavery, and early colonialism were linked to human capital formation, but this connection appears to have been heterogeneous. The contact with the Atlantic slave trade increased regional divergence, as the coast of Senegambia developed more quickly than inner areas. This pattern was affected by French early colonialism and by the reaction of different West African populations to the economic incentives provided by foreign demand for agricultural products. The peanut trade since the mid-nineteenth century further amplified regional economic inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on a set of insurance contracts brokered in Antwerp in 1562–1563, we demonstrate that by that time Antwerp hosted a sophisticated, large, and international market for marine insurance in which small and large traders could acquire and sell insurance, backed by the intermediation of a large broker, Juan Henriquez who functioned as an open-access institution. Using information from Henriquez's ledgers which was also available to underwriters, we find that insurance premiums reflected the underlying risk and that agents were able to determine the effect of different contract parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do changes to taxation policy affect the organizational choices of firms? Using historical firm data constructed from Japanese corporate genealogies, we examine the short-run impact of introducing a personal income tax (PIT) in 1887 on tax-motivated incorporation. Between 1880 and 1892, we find that the introduction of PIT increased the share of incorporated firms by more than 3 percentage points, indicating firms chose their organizational structure to avoid new taxation. Furthermore, our results suggest that a corporate income tax may have acted as a backstop to maintain revenue collected through PIT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twentieth century was not strictly driven by urbanization, black migration, or white flight: it resulted from increasing racial sorting at the household level. In all areas—North and South, urban and rural—segregation increased dramatically. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study uses new data on Swedish national wealth over the last two hundred years to examine whether the patterns in wealth-income ratios found by Piketty and Zucman (2014) extend to small and less developed economies. The findings reveal both similarities and differences. During the industrialization era, Sweden's domestic wealth was relatively low because of low saving rates and instead foreign capital imports became important. Twentieth-century trends and levels are more similar, but in Sweden government wealth grew more important, not least through its relatively large public pension system. Overall, the findings suggest that initial conditions and economic and political institutions matter for the structure and evolution of national wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We use annual information on apprenticeships in England between 1710–1805 to estimate the dynamic supply-responsiveness in this market in the presence of the increasingly powerful technological shocks as the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace. Using both an Instrumental Variable method and a dynamic Vector Autoregression framework (VAR) system to identify the long-run response functions, we find evidence of an elastic supply, sufficiently high as to allow quantities to rise considerably in response to demand shocks. This finding lends support to the view that Britain's apprenticeship institution was the source of its advantage in skilled mechanical labor, so critical to its economic success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding long-term changes in human well-being is central to understanding the consequences of economic development. An extensive anthropometric literature purports to show that heights in the United States declined between the 1830s and the 1890s, which is when the U.S. economy modernized. Most anthropometric research contends that declining heights reflect the negative health consequences of industrialization and urbanization. This interpretation, however, relies on sources subject to selection bias. Our meta-analysis shows that the declining height during industrialization emerges primarily in selected samples. We also develop a parsimonious diagnostic test that reveals, but does not correct for, selection bias in height samples. When applied to four representative height samples, the diagnostic provides compelling evidence of selection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Belle Époque Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom. Exploiting a new granular trade dataset, we find that the number of products delivered abroad and destinations serviced more than doubled in less than 40 years. To explain this remarkable achievement, we study the relationship between trade costs and the intensive and extensive margins of trade. The establishment of a foreign diplomatic network that lowered beachhead costs and enabled the entry of new products was an essential fact of the trade boom. Interestingly, the expansion in trade in certain sectors did not translate into faster productivity growth. We offer some explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I decompose the market value of Colonial New Jersey's paper money into its component parts, namely its real-asset present value and transaction premium. Its market value was predominately determined by its real-asset present value. I also find a small transaction premium that is positively associated with the quantity of paper money in circulation and with the land-bank method of paper money injection. This paper money was not a fiat currency. It traded below face value due to time-discounting not depreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. home ownership rate rose by 10 percentage points between 1940 and 1945, despite severe restrictions on construction during World War II. I investigate whether wartime rent control played a role in this shift. The empirical test exploits variation in rent reductions across cities that had similar increases in rents prior to control. This variation does not appear to be correlated with underlying trends also driving home ownership. Greater initial rent reductions led to larger increases in home ownership; rent control can account for a significant share of the increase in home ownership over the early 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines socioeconomic mobility across three generations in Sweden from 1815 and until 2011. Using longitudinal micro-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD), we examine the transmission of socio-economic status along three different dimensions; social class (HISCLASS), occupational status (HISCAM), and earnings. We demonstrate an association between grandfathers' class or occupational status and the outcome of grandsons, when controlling for the association between fathers and sons. The associations remain stable over time and are stronger for paternal grandfathers than for maternal. For earnings, we find no grandparental association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For almost 25 years between 1797 and 1821, the gold standard in Britain was suspended in order to finance the Napoleonic Wars, creating a paper pound or a fiat currency. Suspension was accompanied by substantial inflation and the accumulation of public debt. By identifying shifts in the spot exchange rate of paper pounds for gold, I document how contemporaries' expectations of how debt would be stabilized in the future shaped the pound's internal value. Thus, it is argued that during the “paper pound” period, fiscal prospects provided a third mechanism, beyond monetary and real factors, affecting the price level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the 1880s, southern states introduced pensions for Confederate veterans and widows. They expanded these programs through the 1920s, while states outside the region were introducing cash transfer programs for workers, poor mothers, and the elderly. Using pension application records and county-level electoral data, we argue that political considerations guided the distribution of these pensions. We show that Confederate pension programs were funded during years in which Democratic gubernatorial candidates were threatened at the ballot box. Moreover, we show that pensions were disbursed to counties in which these candidates had lost ground to candidates from alternative parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1900, an extraordinary number of stillbirths appeared in Japan's statistical yearbooks. This article investigates possible biological explanations but concludes that Japan's anomalous stillbirth rates were primarily the result of the deliberate misreporting of infanticides and abortions. On the basis of an international comparison spanning five centuries, it estimates that between 1886 and 1940, Japanese parents filed between 1.7 and 2.8 million false stillbirth reports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The papyri of Roman Egypt provide some of the most important quantifiable data from a first-millennium economy. This paper builds a new dataset of wheat prices, land prices, rents, and wages over the entire period of Roman control in Egypt. Movements in both nominal and real prices over these centuries suggest periods of intensive and extensive economic growth as well as contraction. Across a timeframe that covers several severe mortality shocks, demographic changes appear to be an important, but by no means the only, force behind changes in factor prices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Standard productivity measures indicate large fluctuations in technology during the Great Depression. This article's historical technology series (1892–1966), controlled for aggregation effects, varying input utilization, non-constant returns, and imperfect competition, does not indicate technology regress such that could trigger the downturn. In contrast, technology improvements in the recovery were so rapid that, over the whole Great Depression period, technology growth was highest among pre-WWII decades. This article also finds that output changed little and inputs fell when technology improved in the pre-WWII period. Real-business-cycle models have difficulty in explaining pre-WWII business cycles characterized by such responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I use unique city-month level disaggregated data, from public employment offices, to estimate the matching functions for the 1920s and the early 1930s. The results show that the public labor exchange was slack, a relative deficiency of job vacancies, in the 1920s and it became slacker during the Great Depression. However, the findings show that there was no deterioration of the matching efficiency in the early 1930s. The outcome of a deficiency of labor demand during the 1930s implies that there was a need for effective government policies to implement the new job-creation programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts of academic dissertations on economic history-related topics which include an evaluation of health policy in the U.S., bank failures in Chicago, Illinois during the Great Depression in 1923-1933, and return migration from the U.S. in the early 1990s.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the origins of globalization. It examines the process of commodity price convergence, an indicator of globalization, between Europe and Asia on the basis of newly obtained price data from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Prices for many commodities in the Dutch-Asiatic trade converged already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the growth of trade and competition among traders and companies. The extent of convergence, however, was determined, in part, by the ability of the VOC to control commodity markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New benchmark estimates of Black-White income ratios for 1870, 1900, and 1940 are combined with standard post-World War census data. The resulting time series reveals that the pace of racial income convergence has generally been steady but slow, quickening only during the 1940s and the modern Civil Rights era. I explore the interpretation of the time series with a model of intergenerational transmission of inequality in which racial differences in causal factors that determine income are very large just after the Civil War and which erode slowly across subsequent generations.“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” —W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the Medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of villages over a period of six centuries (thirteenth-nineteenth). Based on this original dataset, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change in which gender-biased inheritance systems emerged as a defensive measure to preserve the wealth of village insiders. This institutional change also had implications for the population growth, marriage strategies, and the protection from economic shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of papers presented at the Economic History Association 2015 annual meeting including school resources and labor market outcomes in Georgia in early 20th century, intergenerational income mobility, and land value index for Manhattan, New York City in 1950-2013.

This article shows that there were timing, geographic, and sectoral anomalies in the 1937/38 recession, none of which are easily explained by aggregate shocks. I argue that an auto industry supply shock contributed both to the recession's anomalies and to its severity. Labor-strife-induced wage increases and an increase in raw material costs led auto manufacturers to raise prices in fall 1937. Expectations of these price increases brought auto sales forward. When auto prices finally rose, sales plummeted. This shock likely reduced 1938 auto sales by roughly 600,000 units and 1938 GDP growth by 0.5–1 percentage point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the risks and returns to currency speculation during the 1920s and 1930s. We study the performance of two well-known technical trading strategies (carry and momentum) and compare them with that of a fundamentals-based trader: John Maynard Keynes. Technical strategies were highly profitable during the 1920s and even outperformed Keynes. In the 1930s, however, both technical strategies and Keynes performed relatively poorly. While our results reveal the existence of profitable opportunities for currency traders in the interwar years, they suggest that such profits were necessary compensation for enduring the substantial risks that all strategies entailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use newly available micro-data from the 1911 to 1941 Canadian Censuses to investigate the impact of immigration on the Canadian earnings distribution in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that Canadian inequality rose sharply in the inter-war years, particularly in the 1920s, coinciding with two of the largest immigration decades in Canadian history. We find that immigration was not the main force driving changes in the earnings distribution. This results from a combination of self-selection by immigrants, occupational adjustments after arrival, and general equilibrium adjustments in the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reassesses the causes of Chicago state bank failures during the Great Depression by tracking the evolution of their balance sheets in the 1920s. I find that all banks suffered tremendous deposit withdrawals; however banks that failed earlier in the 1930s had invested more in mortgages in the 1920s. The main problem with mortgages was their lack of liquidity, not their quality. Banks heavily engaged in mortgages did not have enough liquid assets to face the withdrawals, and failed. This article thus reasserts the importance of pre-crisis liquidity risk management in preventing bank failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates criticisms by Sarah G. Carmichael, Alexandra de Pleijt, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Tine De Moor of our view of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), and explains why their claims are incorrect. We elaborate our arguments concerning the institutional sources of economic growth, explore the relationship between women's position and the EMP, analyze the two-way links between demographic and economic behavior, and explicate aspects of our empirical analysis that these scholars find puzzling. The causes of European economic growth, we reiterate, are not to be found in the EMP but rather must be sought in the wider framework of nonfamilial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We review different interpretations of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and explore how they relate to the discussion of the link between the EMP and economic growth. Recently Dennison and Ogilvie have argued that the EMP did not contribute to growth in Early Modern Europe. We argue that the link between the EMP and economic growth is incorrectly conceptualized. Age of marriage is not a good scale for the degree to which countries were characterized by EMP. Rather, the economic effects of the EMP should be seen in the broader context of how marriage responds to changing economic circumstance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have long debated whether ownership matters for firm performance. The standard view regarding Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on performance. In this article, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial expropriation. Contrastingly, we find that directors who were independent of large owners were more likely to increase shareholder value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]