The decision by developing countries to open up their economies to foreign trade and investment in the 1980s and 1990s was a momentous event in world history. How and why did this trade policy revolution take place? Most accounts of trade politics stress domestic interest groups or trade agreements as driving policy changes, but these explanations fail in this period. This paper notes that many import restrictions were imposed for balance of payments purposes, as a way of avoiding a devaluation and protecting foreign exchange reserves from depletion under fixed exchange rates. A shortage of foreign exchange in the mid-1980s forced countries, under the guidance of economists, to shift to a more flexible exchange rate system that boosted export earnings and made import controls unnecessary for payments balance. Just as seen during the Great Depression, the exchange rate regime was a key factor in a country’s trade policy.

This paper uses newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840–1852 to study the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. Exploiting the expansion of the telegraph network in a difference-in-difference approach, I find that access to telegraphed news from Washington significantly increased voter turnout in national elections. Newspapers facilitated the dissemination of national news to local areas. Text analysis on historical newspapers shows that the improved access to news from Washington led local newspapers to cover more national political news, including coverage of Congress, the presidency, and sectional divisions involving slavery.

We evaluate the role of taxes on overseas trade in the development of imperial Britain’s fiscal-military state. Influential work, for example, Brewer’s Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series disaggregating excise revenues from traded and domestic goods. We find substantial growth in revenue from traded goods, accounting for over half of indirect taxation around 1800. This challenges conventional wisdom, attributing the development of the British state to domestic factors. International factors mattered, too.

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in twentieth-century India. Creating a new dataset of district-level political outcomes between 1920 and 1957, we find that both the partial franchise extension of 1935 and the universal suffrage reform of 1950 led to limited increases in citizen participation as voters or candidates, and neither reform had a significant effect on increasing political competition. Despite the limited effects on political outcomes, districts with greater enfranchisement increases experienced higher education provision by provincial governments.

This study examines intergenerational mobility in China over 6 centuries using unique genealogical data on father-son pairs from 7 clans in Tongcheng County. Covering 18 generations and approximately 40,000 individuals, the analysis spans a broad set of social classes, from ordinary people to jinshi degree holders. The findings indicate that although social mobility was slow to change, mobility nonetheless underwent a sizable increase during the seventeenth century. The timing of the trends corroborates a number of key changes that affected mobility for commoners and for the highly educated elites. The results also show that intergenerational mobility and inequality are negatively correlated in the time series, a pattern previously observed in cross-sectional studies and commonly known as the Great Gatsby curve.

This paper studies the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a school construction program in the early twentieth-century South. Using a new sample linking Social Security and census records, we find that exposure to Rosenwald schools raised Black women’s labor force participation and occupational standing in 1940; however, we find little evidence that Black men’s occupational standing significantly improved. Blacks made no discernible gains in jobs where they were underrepresented, while the gains they achieved were concentrated in jobs where they were commonly found. This suggests that the scope for Black occupational advancement was limited around 1940.

We ask (1) why the United States adopted the car more quickly than other countries before 1929, and (2) why in the United States the car changed from a luxury to a mass-market good between 1909 and 1919. The answer is in part the success of the Model T in the United States. Mass production of the Model T began in 1913; by 1917, more than 40 percent of U.S. cars were Model Ts. Tariffs and difficulties producing outside Detroit made the U.S. success of the Model T difficult to replicate abroad.

We use individual-level income data from archived taxation lists to study top-income earners in Sweden from 1909 to 1950. Using information on 21,055 individual taxpayers in two elite areas in greater Stockholm, we show that top incomes fell in real terms over this period, at a stable pace without obvious connection to the Great Depression or the world wars. The peak of inequality was related to the early stages of a globalized economy with Schumpeterian entrepreneurial profits; the decline was related to sharpened competition, driving down profits, as well as increased regulation, expansion of education, and eroded position of professionals.

This paper provides quantitative evidence on interbank transmission of financial distress in the Panic of 1907 and ensuing recession. Originating in New York City, the panic led to payment suspensions and emergency currency issuance in many cities. Data on the universe of interbank connections show that (1) suspension was more likely in cities whose banks had closer ties to banks at the center of the panic, (2) banks with such links were more likely to close in the panic and recession, and (3) banks responded to the panic by rearranging their correspondent relationships, with implications for network structure.

Bank distress was a defining feature of the Great Depression in the United States. Most banks, however, weathered the storm and remained in operation throughout the contraction. We show that surviving banks cut lending when depositors withdrew funds en masse during panics. This panic-induced decline in lending explains about one-third of the reduction in aggregate commercial bank lending between 1929 and 1932, more than twice as much as attributed to the failure of banks.

We use the universe of probate and vital registers from England between 1838 and 2018 to document the status of the Irish in England. We identify the “Irish” in the records as those individuals with distinctively Irish surnames. From at least the mid-nineteenth century to 2018, we find that the Irish in England have persisted as an underclass, being on average 50 percent poorer than the English. Infant mortality was about 25 percent higher for the Irish between the 1830s and the mid-twentieth century but has subsequently equalized. Sorting, both to urban areas and to the North of England, are important elements in the Irish experience. We discuss the potential roles of selective migration, social mobility, and discrimination in this and signpost directions for future research.

How do different types of investors perform during financial bubbles? Using a rich archival source, we explore investor performance during the British bicycle mania of the 1890s. We find that directors and employees of cycle companies reduced their holdings substantially during the crash. Those holding shares after the crash were generally not from groups stereotypically thought of as naïve, but gentlemen living near a stock exchange, who had sufficient time, money, and opportunity to engage in speculation. Our findings suggest that the investors most at risk of losing during a bubble are those prone to familiarity and overconfidence biases.

Research on trade liberalization frequently overlooks the effects on third-party welfare. This paper studies a historically tragic third-party consequence of a special case of tariff reform: the British Sugar Act of 1846. Using a new database of monthly observations of prices and import volumes for the period 1840–1853, I estimate the price and welfare effects of the passage of the Sugar Act for consumers and colonial and noncolonial producers. Considerable consumption gains for British consumers and a reduced deadweight loss were derived from the intensification of trade with the slave economies.

Although long-run economic performance has improved primarily through a decline in the rate and frequency of shrinking rather than through an increase in the rate of growing, most analysis of economic development has focused on increasing the rate of growing. We examine the forces making for a reduction in the rate of shrinking. The main proximate factors considered are (1) structural change, (2) technological change, (3) demographic change, and (4) stabilization policy. We conclude by considering institutions and institutional change as the key ultimate factors behind the reduction in shrinking, showing how they operate through political stability.

This paper uses Japanese village censuses, 1637–1872, to measure inequality in landownership. Surprisingly, inequality was low and stable, unlike in Europe, where it was high and increasing. To explain this, I study inter-generational land transmissions. I find that Japanese households without sons adopted male heirs, thereby keeping lands in the family. In contrast, elite English male lines failed 20–30 percent of the time as adoptions were uncommon, leading to a highly unequal redistribution of their lands. Finally, the institutional differences in adoption had roots in fourth-century church policy, and this may partially explain why Europe was more unequal by 1800.