Is Basic Democracy Enough?

In many contexts, elections only partially determine political authority. I examine the impacts of increasing electoral representation in Pakistan’s 1960s local councils known as the “Basic Democracies.” Councils were comprised of members either popularly elected or directly appointed by the military-led government. A formulaic quirk in the establishing law caused their relative proportion of elected members to fluctuate in an alternating pattern as a function of council size. I use this pattern to show that councils with more elected members causally raised less revenue and provided fewer public services. Convergence is slow in this setting and gaps in both public goods and measures of economic activity persist over a 50-year period to 2020. I provide evidence that the primary mechanism is diminished activity within the council. Higher levels of government do not contribute to the effect as differences in public goods provided by them are tightly estimated around zero.

Cory Smith, University of Maryland

Rents and Reformation

We test the hypothesis that the sale of Catholic monastic lands following the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–1540) cemented Protestantism post-Reformation England. Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries members of Parliament (MPs), we first establish that borough constituencies with a higher proportion of monastic lands had MPs who were more likely to support Protestantism during the reign of Mary I (r. 1553–1558). Furthermore, individual MPs with connections to monastic lands were more likely to support Protestantism and opposed Mary I. We go on to show that these attitudes persisted into the late seventeenth century. MPs representing boroughs with monastic lands were more likely to support the exclusion of the Catholic future James II from the throne in 1679–1681.

Mark Koyama, George Mason University, Desiree Desierto, George Mason University, and Marcus Shera, Chapman University

Reason for Treason

Defections in wars are extreme forms of loyalty changes. What makes military officers betray their motherland to serve the invaders? Using a novel data set of career paths of over 2,800 high-ranked (colonels and generals) Nationalist (KMT) military officers in the Second Sino-Japanese War (as part of WWII), we examine defection cases to the Japanese puppet regimes. Three findings emerge. First, the high-ranked KMT officers who were slower in career advancement—either in individual promotions or compared with peers—were more likely to defect, thus a Push Effect. Second, Chiang Kai-shek’s mainstream Whampoa Military Academy graduates were less likely to defect, anticipating better career prospects. Third, high-ranked officers receiving military education in Japan—those prone to have more positive impressions and higher expectations of favorable treatment—were more likely to defect, thus a Pull Effect. This paper highlights the co-existence of internal and external motivations for loyalty transformation.

Zhihao Xu, Tsinghua University, Xinyu Fan, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, Gary Richardson, University of California, Irvine, and Sicheng Zhao, Tsinghua University

New Work in the Second Industrial Revolution

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, rapid technological and procedural innovations dramatically altered the task content of production, leading to the emergence and diffusion of new work activities and occupations. This paper uses the original write-in occupation and industry responses recorded on Census enumeration forms between 1860 and 1940 to identify granular job titles such as “comptometer operator” that existing Census classifications aggregate into broader categories. We document a set of novel facts about new occupations: where they first appeared, how quickly they diffused across labor markets and industries, and the characteristics of the workers who held them. We also study the relationship between technological innovation and adoption by comparing task descriptions of new occupations with the full text of all U.S. patent filed before 1940. While patenting activities became more geographically dispersed, new occupations often became more spatially concentrated before diffusing to other markets.

Jingyi Huang, Brandeis University, Nicholas Carollo, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Elior Cohen, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

Smithian Growth in Britain before the Industrial Revolution, 1500–1800

We systematically document and analyze, for the first time, patterns of Smithian growth in early modern Britain, drawing on a large dataset of wills and distinguishing between extensive—new occupational categories—and intensive—new occupational titles within existing occupational categories—specialization. We provide robust evidence of a significant increase in the division of labor, mostly driven by the growth of the domestic market, in line with Smith’s predictions. While progress in extensive specialization was widespread and benefited from increased demand for manufactures and services, that in intensive specialization was concentrated in Middlesex and was helped by supply factors, like Marshallian externalities. National trends in specialization were associated with economic growth. Currently, we are expanding the international comparison and looking to systematically test the hypotheses that Smithian specialization was a key driver of British pre-industrial economic growth and industrial location during the industrial revolution.

David Chilosi, King’s College London, Giampaolo Lecce, University of Bergamo, and Patrick Wallis, LSE

Mechanization and Occupational Change from Farm to Factory

There have been two great structural transformations of the American labor market: from agriculture to manufacturing, then from manufacturing to services. The more recent is the subject of much contemporary study, especially with respect to job destruction and polarization. We use linked census data to study the job transition effects of the earlier transformation on directly affected agricultural workers from 1920–1950. Reduced form OLS estimates show a positive association between mechanization, as measured by county-level tractor adoption rates, and occupational earnings gains for affected individuals. By contrast, structural estimates using terrain ruggedness to instrument for tractor adoption indicate that mechanization, in isolation, negatively impacted agricultural workers. While the direct effects were negative, the strong correlation between agricultural mechanization and local industrialization resulted in a net positive impact on affected agricultural workers, in stark contrast to our current understanding of the impact of automation/mechanization on modern manufacturing workers.

Jason Long, Wheaton College, and Henry Siu, University of British Columbia

Public Investment and the Benefits of Antebellum Canals

In the antebellum period, state governments actively financed canals, most of which were unprofitable. This paper estimates the benefits these canals conferred to agricultural shippers and assesses whether public investment was socially beneficial. Using a new data set of freight rates from 1840 to 1860, I estimate intercounty trade costs and the impact of changes in counties’ market access on their aggregate land value. I find that a 10 percent decrease in market access is associated with a 2.46 percent decrease in aggregate land value. I then construct counterfactual trade costs by removing state-owned canals, and from this, counterfactual changes in market access and land values. I find that without state canals, 1840 and 1850 land values would have been $40 million and $119 million lower, respectively. Combined with cost and revenue data, this suggests the state canals earned a social rate of return greater than 8 percent and were thus worthwhile investments.

Levi Edwards, University of California, Irvine

From Sail to Steam

Steamships transformed shipping, one of the oldest sectors. While the broad outlines are known, the travel time advantages over sailing ships are not precisely known. We address data and identification challenges utilizing new data on over 100,000 shipping times for sail and steamships entering Barcelona, Cádiz, and Tarragona from 1795 to 1915. We use the official data on the arrival of ships from customs records in daily newspapers. Additionally, we create a new GIS database to calculate route distances between any port of origin and the three Spanish ports. The main empirical finding is that steamships reduced journey times by 71 percent on average. Our empirical strategy takes advantage of the presence of repeated origins, captains, and seasons involving different ships. Extensions examine heterogenous effects by season and impacts on cargo carried and trading partners. Broadly, our results inform on the impacts of technological change in emerging economies.

Dan Bogart, University of California, Irvine, Gregori Galofré-Vilà, Universitat de València, and Eduard Alvarez Palau, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

No Sugar Coating: Quantifying the Welfare Losses from the U.S.-Cuba Trade Policy

What are the consequences of comparative advantage-driven specialization for developing countries navigating socioeconomic transitions? We address this question by studying the Cuban economy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of a quantitative Ricardian model of trade. Using newly digitized historical trade data, we recover Cuba’s revealed comparative advantage before and after the imposition of large trade barriers on its main product, sugar. We perform a counterfactual analysis to provide a quantitative answer to a long-standing question about the Cuban economy: the “road not taken.” What would the Cuban economy have looked like in later years if its economic integration had remained the same as at the beginning of the twentieth century? The answer to this question sheds light on our understanding of the consequences of extreme specialization for developing countries in situations of political instability.

Stefania Garetto, Boston University, Franco Maldonado Carlin, Boston University, and Marie Petkus, Centre College

Coercive Assimilation Policy across Generations: Evidence from American Indian Boarding Schools

Governments, colonial powers, and other state actors have frequently sought to reshape the culture, attitudes, and identities of their subjects through assimilation policies and indoctrination efforts, often targeting ethnic minorities. I show that coercive assimilation policy can cause substantial cultural change among ethnic minorities, but that these effects do not necessarily persist into later generations, and may even reverse. I focus on a historical policy in the United States under which authorities removed Native American children to distant boarding schools. I exploit the staggered recruitment patterns of schools and variation in cohort exposure to facilitate causal identification. I show that exposure to boarding schools offered few economic benefits, but did lead to substantial cultural and social assimilation. However, these changes did not come at the expense of cultural connection, as measured through appearance on historical tribal rolls. Ultimately, the schools seem to have strengthened the identities they sought to erase.

Christian Maruthiah, Trinity College Dublin

Little School on the Prairie: A Push for Structural Change

The one room school house looms large in North American history, but we have little information on the role these rural schools played in economic development. Using linked full count census records from the early twentieth-century Canadian prairies combined with precise geolocations for individual households and schools, I examine the effect of the roll out of one room schoolhouses on children’s educational participation and later life outcomes. I find that geographic proximity plays an important roll in education participation, and educational participation correlates with adult income and decreases the likelihood of working in agriculture. Using a difference in differences strategy exploiting the timing of school rollout, I find that a treated child is 3.92pp less likely to be found in agriculture as an adult, and lives 16.8 percent further from their childhood home. This suggests that education access can act as a push factor for structural change in rural areas.

Devin Bissky Dziadyk, University of Toronto

Textbooks and the Processing and Circulation of Information in the U.S. 1870–1940

Historical studies on the circulation of information rarely make reference to the language and numeric skills of the population involved, despite the seeming relevance of these skills to the transmission of knowledge. This paper will deal with a major instructional change affecting one of those skills, reading, its impact on the processing of information, and the costs. The change consisted simply in the swap of a textbook known as a speller for a series of readers, but it came to involve the application of a new pedagogy and school re-organization. The economic consequences for the printing industry and, especially, public schools are at the center of the analysis, with a focus on the situation in the United States, although references will be made to similar changes in Great Britain.

Carole Shammas, University of Southern California

Zoning and the American Suburb

Suburbs were transformed after WWII, with mixed-use development giving way to low-density, purely residential neighborhoods. This paper investigates the role of zoning in this transformation and provides clear, causal evidence on the role of regulation over the long run. First, we find that developers were creating large, uniformly sized lots even before zoning was adopted. However, residential parcels developed under zoning are 18 percentage points less likely to have stores nearby and 9 percentage points less likely to be near apartments today. Zoning also increased lot sizes: if all subdivision had occurred without minimum lot size regulations, there would be 4.4 percent more single-family housing units in suburban Cook county. Our results indicate that land use regulation accelerated the emergence of exclusively single-family residential neighborhoods over to the suburban form that would have prevailed without zoning, which would have featured more mixed uses and smaller lots.

Allison Shertzer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Ryan Gallagher, Northeastern Illinois University, and Tate Twinam, William and Mary

Expecting an Expressway

We provide theory and evidence on the role of self-fulfilling expectations in determining urban spatial structure. In U.S. central cities, there was near certainty in the mid-1950s that planned urban highway segments would reduce neighborhood quality of life, as Interstate builders enjoyed widespread support and faced few constraints. But unanticipated federal and state reforms led to the permanent cancellation of some highway projects after 1973. Planned—but never constructed—urban Interstate segments caused neighborhood declines through 1970, and these declines persisted for decades afterwards, despite plan cancellation. These results are consistent with forward-looking behavior and strong economies of density in residential location choice.

Jeffrey Lin, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Jeffrey Brinkman, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and Kyle Mangum, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

How Did Mortgage Market Segmentation Affect Early U.S. Urban Development?

How do financial markets shape urbanization? This paper studies the late nineteenth century, a time when the rate of urbanization peaked amid a large, highly heterogeneous, and mostly unintermediated mortgage market. I focus on the role of a new type of financial intermediary, the Building and Loan Association (B&L), in redirecting capital to urban development. Using newly digitized annual county level mortgage data from 1880–1890 and a complete history of B&L entry, I show suggestive evidence that the entry of the first B&L into a county reallocated capital from the rural to the urban mortgage market and accelerated real urbanization trends.

Daniel Milo, NYU Stern

Branching Out: Bank Deregulation and Long-Run Growth

We show how banks can improve capital mobility and affect economic growth by studying a major but overlooked wave of bank deregulation in the United States. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, half of U.S. states meaningfully relaxed restrictions on bank branching for the first time. These legal regimes remained largely unchanged until the interstate branching deregulations of the 1970s, by which point over 70 percent of banking offices were already part of branch networks. We show that these early regulatory changes had persistent real effects: states that deregulated first experienced significantly higher deposit growth and real manufacturing value added growth through the 1990s. Using a novel dataset of branch-level balance sheets, we show that these effects stem from branch networks’ internal capital markets allocating resources to less financially developed areas.

Sarah Quincy, Vanderbilt University, and Chenzi Xu, University of California, Berkeley

Retirement, Savings, and Insurance in America, 1861 to 1941

The history of savings and investing in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been forgotten. This essay sets the record straight. Ordinary policies insured individuals against the risk of dying too soon—and have a lower than expected lifetime income—and living too long—and thus having higher than expected lifetime expenses. Ordinary life insurance policies were the most common way that ordinary working and middle income families saved for contingencies and retirement in America from 1900 to 1940. Ordinary policies grew in popularity after the Civil War and dominated personal finance after the turn of the century. The source of their popularity was high returns and low risks relative to competing investments. This essay explains the rise and decline of the ordinary life industry, why these policies are not offered by the insurance industry today, and the economic and political implications of this form of investing.

Gary Richardson, University of California, Irvine, Vellore Arthi, University of California, Irvine, and Mark Van Orden, University of California, Irvine

Learning to Be a Lender of Last Resort: A History of the Federal Reserve’s Approach to Emergency Liquidity Provision in the 1920s

This paper discusses emergency lending operations by the Federal Reserve to banks during the 1920s and illustrates that it was more extensive than previously understood. Drawing on policymaker letters and statements, this paper describes the motivations that policymakers had for intervening and, through a review of three case studies, how interventions were structured and ways officials managed risk. These interventions were successful in providing liquidity support and preventing both disorderly defaults and likely contagion. However, staff reports and policymaker discussions indicate that some aspects and unintended consequences of these, and similar, episodes concerned Federal Reserve officials. This paper discusses how, in response to these concerns, policymakers changed (tightened) their approach to emergency lending. These experiences, and the reactions of Federal Reserve officials, also provide lessons for today.

Mark Carlson, Federal Reserve Board of Governors

Equality before the Law? Evidence from Union Army Courts-Martial

We investigate the factors contributing to equality before the law in the Union Army, 1863–1865, when military necessity led to Black men bearing arms. We show that threats to the social order, particularly those involving group violence, were differentially punished particularly harshly and that differential punishments increased over time coincident with pay mutinies before falling. We also find evidence of a trade-off between fines and other punishments, consistent with the classical Becker framework, but which arguably left Black soldiers exposed to punishments involving hard labor. Sentencing severity responded to external war events but not differentially by race. Despite the endemic racism of the era, the extent of differential sentencing for crimes which did not involve group violence was less than it is today. Likely explanations include more professional jurors, a limited role for appeals and lawyers, and the incentives of the military.

Dora Costa, University of California, Los Angeles and Ziqi Zhao, Princeton University

Gender Equity in the U.S. Civil Service: Evidence from the Classification Act of 1923

Organizations often implement pay standardization schemes to address pay gaps based on gender, race, or ethnicity. These schemes limit managerial discretion to determine wages. While this should reduce inequality within job titles, it may shift disparities to other margins, such as position quality or promotions. Using a triple difference identification strategy, we study the effects of the Classification Act of 1923, which standardized pay grades and position categories in the U.S. Civil Service, on women’s earnings relative to men’s. We find that the law did not improve women’s relative pay within job titles and lowered their overall relative compensation, suggesting changes in job quality. We find large negative effects on the position margin. In response to the law, departments downgraded women to lower-quality positions. These negative consequences predominantly affected newly hired women.

Ellen Anderson, University of California, Davis, and Socorro Martinez, University of California, Davis

Returns to Education for Women in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws

Women had a similar level of schooling to men during the mid-twentieth century United States, but research on the returns to education for women is scarce. Using compulsory schooling laws as IVs, this paper examines the causal effect of education on women’s labor market and marriage market outcomes. I show that an additional year of education increased women’s probability of gainful employment by 7.1 pp. and being in a skilled occupation by 1.2 to 3.3 pp. The positive returns in the labor market were larger for women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. On the other hand, education surprisingly did not affect women’s probability of marriage, but it increased their probability of divorce by 1.4 pp. Conditional on marriage formation, there is evidence of assortative mating and a positive effect of women’s education on the husband’s employment and wage earnings, which suggests an increasing level of education for women led to a better match in the marriage market.

Sophie Li, University of Southern Denmark

Movies, Censorship, and the Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s ushered in some of the most fundamental changes in American society. During the same period, the content of American movies underwent a dramatic transformation. This paper provides an empirical account of the evolution and impact of the sexual revolution on-screen over the twentieth century. Assembling a novel dataset for the universe of American films, we document a sudden and dramatic rise in sexual content on-screen during the 1960s. We trace the origins of this shift to the collapse of the Hays Code, a set of self-censorship guidelines that governed Hollywood film content for three decades during the 1930s–60s. Leveraging newly digitized movie theater data across counties and spatial variation in movie exposure in a difference-in-differences framework, we show that the change in movie content raised fertility rates in the population, including out-of-wedlock teen births.

Tianyi Wang, University of Toronto, and Hui Ren Tan, National University of Singapore

Doux Commerce: Markets, Culture, and Cooperation in 1850–1920 U.S.

This paper studies the impact of markets on individualistic cultural traits and cooperation, focusing on the expansion of the railroad network and population growth in the United States from 1850 to 1920. A county-level analysis leverages excess variation in counties’ market access that is orthogonal to the expansion of local railroad networks. An individual-level analysis uses a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of migrating to locations with a higher market access relative to lower market access. Both empirical strategies reveal that market access fostered individualistic cultural traits. The findings indicate that this relationship is due to a direct influence of commerce on culture and psychology, rather than indirect effects through market-induced changes in population diversity, economic development, access to information, or legal institutions. Consistent with theories suggesting that individualistic cultural traits facilitate cooperation with strangers, we find that market access broadened the scope of cooperation across various spheres of life.

Itzchak Tzachi Raz, Hebrew University, and Max Posch, University of Exeter

The Rise of the Chinese Clan

For centuries, the Chinese primarily organized economic and social activities among those bonded together by a common patrilineal ancestor under a set of tightly regulated Confucian cultural attributes. Taking into consideration that ancestral worship is the hallmark of the Chinese clan, we leverage a historical natural experiment—the Ritual Reform of 1536—and use a DID design to trace its growth. We find that nearly all 18,685 ancestral halls (98.7 percent) enumerated from 4,500 county gazetteers across China for 800 years (c. 1136–1935) were only erected after 1536, and in counties more suitable for rice cultivation. The spectacular growth was empowered by the reform, as it allowed the people to worship their first ancestor and relaxed restrictions on ancestral hall construction. Additional analysis finds that ancestral halls were mostly erected by commoners, driven by a greater demand for irrigation projects, and by clan competition.

Wenbing Wu, University of Melbourne, and James Kung, University of Melbourne

Archaic Lending or Precocious Financialization? Spanish American Finance to 1800

Economic Historians have long assumed that colonial Spanish American finance was poorly developed. A sizeable theoretical literature has offered possible causal links between colonial rule and weak financial intermediation pointing primarily to a lack of secure property rights. This paper proposes an alternative explanatory path. Section 2 offers an analysis of a sui generis financial system that provided cheap and ubiquitous public and private credit. Section 3 analyzes the subscriptions to one particularly large loan to the public purse in the 1770s to zoom in on the functioning of public credit, its link with private finance, the composition of the subscribers, and the role of the merchant corporation. Section 3 suggests that reading the evidence within a theoretical frame of financialization may be more helpful than the traditional institutionalist political economy analysis.

Regina Grafe, Cambridge

Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality among Migrant Workers in the Dominican Republic

This paper examines racial and ethnic inequality among immigrants to the Dominican Republic using residency permit data from 1940 to 1954. Most immigrants came from Haiti and the West Indies to cut sugarcane for American corporations. We document a racial socioeconomic hierarchy, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. Haitians fared worse than other blacks, and these differences are not fully explained by observed health and human capital. The evidence does not support explanations for these differences based on the importance of English fluency or British diplomatic support. There is some evidence that geographic isolation deepened labor market inequalities, allowing monopsonistic employers to discriminate against Haitians. Even so, much of Haitians’ initial disadvantages likely stemmed from lower levels of human capital upon arrival.

Brian Marein, Wake Forest University, and Craig Palsson, Utah State University

Local Elites vs. Central Powers: Government Resource Allocation in the British West Indies (1838–1938)

When slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, there was concern about integrating emancipated slaves into society, creating education, social welfare, and economic systems similar to Britain. In the British West Indies, two types of local governments existed: one where plantation elites controlled finances through an elected assembly, and another, known as crown colonies, where the governor had full control over government spending. The 1865 Morant Rebellion led to many elite-controlled governments transforming into crown colonies. This study examines how these governments influenced spending on the emancipated population, focusing on categories like public health, education, religion, and infrastructure. By analyzing nearly 2,000 colonial budget sheets from 1838–1938 across 18 Caribbean colonies, we test how government type affected resource allocation. This research contributes to understanding colonial welfare systems and the impact of centralized governance on social and economic outcomes in the British West Indies.

Eric Strobl, University of Bern, and Fabio Gatti, University of Bern

Economic Consequences of the 1933 Soviet Famine

This article studies the changes in the Soviet population and the urbanization patterns after the 1933 famine. It documents that the famine is associated with a persistent negative change in the urban population. The rural population gradually recovered while urban settlements in more affected areas became permanently smaller. The paper shows that these changes were not planned in the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1933), but that subsequent plans may have incorporated and exacerbated the differences in urbanization that occurred during the years of rural crisis. The paper argues that the shortage of labor during the crucial years of the rapid industrialization hindered the development of cities in areas stricken by the famine. The timing of the shock to the population appears to be important. While established urban networks tend to recover from large temporary negative shocks, the lack of people during construction and rapid growth might have a permanent negative impact.

Natalya Naumenko, George Mason University

Communal Landownership and the Demand for Land Titling in Imperial Russia

Land titling reforms around the globe often encounter moderate participation rates, despite their potential economic benefits. Why do farmers hesitate to claim private land titles? To address this question, this paper examines the historical case of the 1906 land reform in the Russian Empire. The reform enabled peasants to title their plots that had previously fallen under communal tenure. Drawing on newly digitized commune-level data from the province of Simbirsk, the paper argues that local differences in the practices of land reallocation across peasant households, known as repartitions, shaped the benefits and costs of transitioning to private property. I find that the reform was much less successful in communes where repartitioning practices acted as a substitute for the land market. The results imply that the design of land reforms should take into account the incentive structure created by traditional property rights regimes.

Natalia Vasilenok, Stanford University

Great Leap Backward: Mechanization of Soviet Agriculture in the 1930s

We analyze the effects of Soviet industrialization during the second 5-year plan (1933–1937) on the agricultural sector. Particularly, we estimate the effects of technological adoption of new machinery (tractors, combiners) on agricultural productivity. Our results indicate that the capital productivity was merely 30 percent. Such a low productivity might be partly induced by capital misallocation on a farm level as the local rural bureaucrats had to provide mechanized services to “weak” collective farms; otherwise, there would be a high chance of repressions due to a failure of the district procurement plans. Last, an instrumental approach that amends a severe selection in state-provided mechanized services provision shows that “potential” productivity gain from tractors could be around 200–300 percent. Overall, this historical case shows the potential dangers for underdeveloped countries which decide to adopt the similar policies.

Nurlan Utesov, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Paul Dower, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Western Impact and Eastern Responses: The Role of Ideology in Chinese and Japanese Modernization during Nineteenth–Twentieth Centuries

This paper revisits the old thesis of the contrasting paths of modernization between Japan and China. It develops a new theoretical model to incorporate the role of ideology and ideological change as the key determinant behind Meiji Japan’s decisive turn towards the West pitted against Qing China’s lethargic response to Western imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. We compile systematic regional data to test statistically on how the contrast between Tokugawa Japan’s feudal, fragmented political regime and Qing China’s centralized bureaucratic system shaped the differential patterns of ideological realignment in the mid-nineteenth century. We show the significant impact of such ideological change through Japan’s early advancements in scientific publishing, railway development, and internationalization of education etc. We further argue that the 1894–95 Japanese naval victory over China served as the catalyst for China’s ideological and institutional transformation in the twentieth century modeled after the Meiji reform.

Weiwen Yin, University of Macau, Debin Ma, Tsinghua University, and Jared Rubin, Chapman University

Matriarch for the Patriarch: Female Regency and Political Stability in Historical China

Political succession in authoritarian regimes is perilous, often due to the conflict of interest between new leaders and the ruling coalition they inherit from their predecessor. We theorize that such conflict arises from two-sided commitment problems: the ruling elites cannot credibly commit to relinquishing power when the leader seeks to centralize it; and once in power, the leader cannot credibly guarantee to not purging the elites. We examine the emperor-regent relationship in historical China, where these issues were most pronounced. Using original data on minor emperors and regents, we show that female regents, who were culturally protected from political purges but also barred from seizing power, can mitigate the two-sided commitment problems and enhance political stability for the young emperor. Our findings underscore the importance of institutional constraints on incumbent elites in overcoming early leadership challenges, thereby ensuring a smoother transition of authority and long-term political survival for the ruler.

Yuxin (Joy) Chen, Renmin University of China, Zhenhuan Lei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Xiuyu Li, New York University

Guilds, Market Information, and Price Controls in Early Modern Japan

This paper examines the role of guilds in the making of prices during Japan’s early modern period (1600–1868). Previous literature centered on determining if guilds played a positive or negative role in economic development. Instead, this paper uses guild sources to argue that merchant organizations could exploit their superior access to market information in order to shape economic policy, even though they remained formally barred from the halls of power in a society dominated by the samurai, a hereditary warrior class. To do this, it makes use of the understudied archive of the Kotani Shin’emon, a materia medica dealer whose archive contains the only sources for the study of the guilds in the northeastern castle town of Sendai. The paper then situates the role of guilds in early modern Japan within the rich literature on merchant organizations in other premodern societies.

John D’Amico, Tohoku University

African Slavery and the Reckoning of Brazil

More enslaved Africans disembarked in Brazil than in any other country in the New World. Using new archival data, we build real wages and inequality series covering 1574 to 1920 in Brazil, finding these were initially on a similar level to Europe, but as the slave trade increased, wages decreased, and inequality increased. Unskilled wages recovered only after enforcement of the slave trade prohibition. We build a model that explains how cheap enslaved labor fostered the direction of technology favoring coerced tasks, while prohibition shocks redirected production toward free labor, raising wages. We show that slave trade prohibition shocks are correlated with an increase in slave prices causing an average increase in wages for unskilled tasks and a decrease in wage inequality. These findings suggest that prolonged reliance on slave labor delayed Brazil’s transition to higher wages and modern economic growth, comparatively to other economies.

Nuno Palma, University of Manchester, and Guilherme Lambais, Lusíada University

Wealth Inequality in Preindustrial Sicily: A Reconstruction (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)

This article draws on new archival research to provide a reconstruction of wealth inequality in Sicily throughout the entire early modern period. We leverage exceptionally comprehensive fiscal records, the riveli, to gather information about average wealth, total population and other key variables at various dates for each community of the island. Thereafter, we combine this information with household-level wealth distributions for a sample of communities to generate estimates of the overall inequality levels across Sicily. These estimates are compared with those available for other Italian and European regions. Similar to other areas, Sicilian inequality is found to be growing from the mid-seventeenth century—but not in the previous century or so, marking an interesting divergence from the historical experience of other regions. The article also explores the distributive consequences of major natural catastrophes, such as the eruption of the Etna volcano in 1669 and the devastating earthquake of 1693.

Guido Alfani, Bocconi University, Sonia Schifano, Bocconi University, and Sergio Sardone, Federico II University of Naples

Forced Displacement and Resettlement: Jewish Refugees in Shanghai during WWII

This paper examines the long-term effects of forced displacement of a unique historical cohort: Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany to Shanghai during WWII and resettled in the United States post-war. Using archival data, we compile a detailed dataset on their demographics, migration routes, and occupational backgrounds. Most refugees traveled with immediate family, departed from Berlin or Vienna via Italian ports, and held diverse occupations such as merchants, professionals, and artisans. To study the long-term effects of forced displacement, we use record linkage algorithms to identify Shanghai refugees in the 1950 U.S. census and compare their educational and labor market outcomes with a control group of Jewish refugees who migrated directly from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. We find that by 1950, the Shanghai cohort was significantly less likely to have attended college or secured white-collar employment than their U.S.-direct counterparts.

Sally Zhang, Tufts University, and Parker Zhao, Stripe

The Hidden Driver of Japan’s Interwar Depression: Farm Price Collapse and Redistribution

Japan’s GDP fell in 1930 on a scale comparable to the U.S. Great Depression. While conventional narratives emphasize the role of global depression as well as deflation, exports did not fall. This paper argues that the collapse of agricultural prices, now known only as farmers’ disaster, significantly reduced consumption by redistributing real income from farm to nonfarm households. The MPC of farm households, which is estimated from interwar survey data compiled and digitized by this paper, was increased by their indebtedness and low liquid asset holdings. Combined with the assumptions of equal or lower nonfarm MPC and the limited pass-through to consumer prices, the farm MPC estimate of 0.46 implies that the redistribution reduced consumption by 1.5–3.6 percent in 1930. By estimating and using the prewar fiscal multiplier, this paper shows that its contribution to the depression was 27–59 percent of GDP decline in 1930.

Shingo Watanabe, Bank of Japan

Financial Regulation and Household Portfolio Reallocation: The Impact of the 1905 Dutch Lottery Ban

How do individuals respond when gambling is prohibited? Using unique, hand-collected data from Dutch inheritance tax records, we study portfolio allocations following the 1905 lottery ban, which prohibited traditional lotteries while preserving lottery bonds as a legal alternative. After the policy implementation, we show that low-wealth individuals shifted significantly toward lottery bonds, representing a reallocation toward a regulated product offering skewed returns. This substitution was pronounced among older individuals and those living farther away from financial centers, highlighting how age-dependent habits and geographic frictions shape responses to financial regulation. While the policy reduced access to highly skewed assets, thereby limiting aspirational utility, it redirected gambling preferences toward instruments with less volatile return distribution, enhancing personal financial stability or intergenerational wealth transfer. Our results indicate how restrictive policies can channel speculative behaviors into regulated alternatives, generating positive externalities despite limiting individual choice.

Gertjan Verdickt, University of Auckland, and Amaury De Vicq, University of Groningen

Market Integration or Segmentation? Prices in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1874–5

This paper uses a newly-digitized data set of Chinese prices from the San Francisco Chinese News, the only Chinese-American newspaper from the 1800s with multiple extant issues (Lo and Lai 1976). It compares the pricing of goods in the Chinese market with prices from the wholesale San Francisco market at the same time, using news articles published in the Daily Alta California, an English-language newspaper also published in San Francisco. Preliminary results show that the Chinese market had a higher coefficient of variation than the native market, indicating more volatile pricing. Looking at products that may have been the same between markets, some show similar trends while others do not.

Geoff Clarke, Brandeis University, and Yinchu Zhu, Brandeis University

The Evolution and Economic Impact of African American Banks: The United States from 1900 to Present

This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the historical evolution of African American-owned banks in the United States and their long-term role in addressing the racial wealth gap. Utilizing a difference-in-differences approach, we investigate the effects of Black bank openings and closures on African American homeownership across U.S. counties over the long run. Our findings demonstrate that Black banks significantly fostered homeownership, a vital driver of wealth accumulation, in the regions they operated. In contrast, their closures had a disproportionate effect, causing a decline in African American homeownership.

Mintra Dwarkasing, University of Bonn, Narly Dwarkasing, FEFP, Yashvir Gangaram Panday, Erasmus University, and Lucia Gomez Llactahuamani, Harvard University

The Effect of Land Institutions on Reforestation Policies: Evidence from the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (1930–2000)

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal conservation-employment program, created over three million jobs from 1933 to 1942 while implementing projects in reforestation, soil conservation, and park infrastructure. This study evaluates the CCC’s short- and long-term effects on land use, reforestation, and recreation using a difference- in-differences (DID) and event study framework. I compiled a primary database, including camp locations, project types, land acquisition methods, historical land use data, and census records. Results show that while overall forest and land proportions declined during the post-treatment period, counties with higher camp densities and newly purchased lands experienced significant increases in forest cover, particularly deciduous forests. Conversely, National and State Forests showed limited impact. The findings underscore the importance of camp density and land acquisition strategies in achieving conservation goals. These insights highlight how conservation-employment programs can balance job creation and long-term environmental sustainability with careful planning.

Aparna Howlader, Chatham University

Political Talk Radio and Rural Conservatism

This paper studies the impact of the rise of conservative radio over the airwaves following the national syndication of the Rush Limbaugh Show in 1988. To identify the effect of conservative radio programs, I identify two plausibly exogenous factors that could affect exposure to political talk radio: (1) the choice of non-talk radio programming available and (2) the amount of time people drive in vehicles as a captive audience to car radio. First, using the American National Election Studies, I provide empirical evidence that these two factors jointly affected individual consumption of political talk radio. Next, utilizing a triple-difference specification, I show that following 1988, Republican vote share disproportionately increased in counties with fewer radio programming choices and where people average a longer commute. Finally, because rural areas are more likely to share those characteristics, I show that the rural population became more conservative following 1988, only in areas with greater exposure to conservative radio.

Heyu Xiong, Case Western Reserve University

Route to Cities: Natural Endowments under Varying Institutions

According to economic geography literature, the location and size of cities are influenced by natural endowments (first nature) and human decisions (second nature). This study examines the role of natural endowments and their interaction with human decisions in the pre-industrial era. By examining the location of cities in China over the past 2000 years and linking natural endowments to historical transportation networks, my analysis reveals that natural endowments on routes generally had a positive and statistically significant influence on urban location. However, the magnitude of this effect was not constant over time but fluctuated across different dynastic cycles. This suggests that the value added to natural endowments shifted in response to changing institutional contexts.

Ruoran Cheng, London School of Economics and Political Science

Physician Preferences for Consultation Restrictions in the Late Nineteenth Century

Data limitations restrict our understanding of physician disagreement on medical policy decisions. This paper harnesses a unique setting for which comprehensive individual-level data on physician support for a collective policy exists: whether regular doctors be permitted to consult with homeopaths in the early 1880s state of New York. Combining information from many sources, I use a novel dataset of 5,003 doctors to find that physician eminence, distance to competitors, and private economic costs related to a change in policy are associated with physicians’ choices. While contemporary arguments highlight patient welfare, my results suggest that this concern may be limited for some doctors. Interestingly, prior “exposure” to homeopathy is significantly positively associated with support for liberalization. While this relationship might be driven by selection, I find that prior exposure increases with political agitation among physicians favoring the restriction on consultations, a result consistent with polarization and the updating of physician beliefs.

Brendon Andrews, University of Alberta

Women in Law and the Draft

During the Vietnam War, women’s representation in full-time law programs grew from 3.7 percent of all students in 1964 to 20.1 percent of all students in 1973. This paper considers the hypothesis that this increase was precipitated by a change in the draft status of men in law school. In 1968, men studying law would lose their ability to claim a 2-S deferment, and the threat of tuition loss to law schools resulting from the draft risk of enrolled men prompted law schools to increase the fraction of women in their incoming classes. To test this hypothesis, we construct a school-by-year dataset of enrollment counts split by sex and full-time/part-time status. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that women’s representation rises by 2 percent in full-time programs relative to part-time programs, which are far less exposed to draft risk, representing a large 45 percent increase over women’s baseline representation of 4.4 percent in 1967.

Thomas Helgerman, University of Minnesota, and Benjamin Pyle, Boston University

Changing Country of Residence without Moving: The Occupational Status of Mexican Americans in 1850

This paper modifies the theory of immigrant labor market adjustment to account for the circumstances of adult men whose country changes not through migration, but because of a movement of national borders. It is applied to the case of Mexican-Americans living in the southwestern United States in 1850, but has broader applicability. Their labor market status is analyzed in comparison to three other groups: men who migrated to the United States from Mexico, native-born, non-Hispanic White men, and European immigrants. Empirical analysis is conducted using the microdata files from the 1850 Census of Population. Several Hispanic identifiers distinguish Mexican-Americans. The paper examines occupational distributions among the four groups, as well as a detailed statistical analysis of the determinants of occupational status. It finds that, in general, the patterns observed in 1850 for Mexican-Americans are largely the same as those observed more recently, including the propensity for sojourner migration among immigrants from Mexico.

Barry Chiswick, George Washington University, and RaeAnn Robinson, George Washington University

Solely by Reason of Her Marriage: The Effect of the 1907 Expatriation Act on Marriage and Family Formation

Under the Expatriation Act of 1907, women who were American citizens would lose their citizenship if they married non-citizen men. This paper considers if a woman’s decision to marry a non-citizen was sensitive to the costs imposed by expatriation using enemy alien registration during WWI as a natural experiment. An executive order in November of 1917 required German men to register as enemy aliens. Registration was extended to German women in April of 1918. U.S. born women who married German men were considered enemy aliens and required to register. When the registration order was in effect, marriage to a German man had a high cost. Taking advantage of the exact date of marriage provided by court records in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, I examine if marriages between German men and American women became less likely after men had to register and then, again, when women themselves had to register.

Melinda Miller, Virginia Tech

The Externalities of Missionary Activity: Tracing the Pre-Independence Origins of Kerala’s Comparative Literacy Advantage

Using rich data on educational outcomes from the Census of India between 1875 and 1931, including novel, longitudinal sub-district (taluk) data, we analyze the long-run roots of Kerala’s literacy advantage. We document differences in educational outcomes between areas governed by colonial and native institutions, but also across areas under different native institutional configurations. We identify the timing of divergence in two princely states that largely comprise modern-day Kerala and then test multiple mechanisms for this divergence. Administrative and census data, bolstered by the qualitative historical record, point to the key role of missionaries in accelerating educational expansion. This paper expands on the economics of colonialism and highlights the importance of missionaries and non-state actors generally.

Alexander Persaud, University of Richmond, and Anil Menon, University of California, Merced

Segregation Academies: The Effect of “Whites Only” Private Education

In response to public schools integrating in the 1960s and 1970s, Southern white parents organized all-white private schools known as “segregation academies.” Building a data set of the universe of segregation academies, we estimate the effects of the opening of a local segregation academy on public school enrollment. On average, a segregation academy causes total public school enrollment to decline by 14 percent across the Deep South. Evidence from Alabama and Louisiana, where we can measure enrollment by race, suggests white students drive this decline: openings cause a 36 percent decrease in white public enrollment, but have no effect on Black public enrollment. These schools offset approximately 1/2 of court-ordered improvements in school integration. Using Internal Revenue Service tax return data, we also measure the extent to which these academies impacted students and communities in the long run based on students’ prime age income, and migration/mobility.

Danielle Graves Williamson, Boston University, and Jennifer Withrow, Census

Revolution Modernizes Education: The Dynamic Consequence of State Building

This paper examines how the 1911 democratic revolution and the establishment of a republic modernized China’s education system. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I find that counties supporting the revolution through violence between 1911 and 1912 had, on average, 0.28 more middle schools, 49 more middle school students, 4 more higher primary schools, and 200 more students enrolled in higher primary schools than non-participating counties within a few years after the revolution. Counties with a stronger revolutionary organization presence before 1911 also saw higher enrollment in Western-style schools. Furthermore, I find that the expansion of modern education changed the distribution of power within the country: counties that supported revolution and had more modern educational facilities produced more national-level government and military elites ten and twenty years later.

Jin Wang, University of Arizona

The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Shortages: Evidence from World War II

This paper investigates the long-run consequences of one of the largest teacher labor market shocks in U.S. history during WWII. The war spurred an unprecedented exodus of teachers, primarily men leaving for the military. Using a difference-in-differences framework that exploits variation in the pre-war gender composition of the teacher workforce and variation in students’ age, I estimate the effects of childhood exposure to this shock on educational attainment and labor market outcomes. I find that increased exposure to teacher shortages reduces high school and college completion, as well as adult income. States more exposed to this shock responded by hiring more teachers on emergency licenses and fewer teachers with college experience. These changes in the composition of the teacher workforce persisted for years after the war, suggesting that even temporary shocks to teacher supply can have lasting impacts on student outcomes through changes in teacher quality.

Michael Briskin, Boston University

Changes in Upward Educational Mobility in the United States over the Twentieth Century: The Role of Public Education

We present new facts on the evolution of intergenerational educational mobility in the United States over the twentieth century. Using two large-scale datasets, we show that upward educational mobility has remained stable between cohorts entering the labor market in 1940 and 2020, despite major changes to the educational landscape. Yet this obscures considerable variation by subgroup and by county. Upward educational mobility has increased for almost all groups, including Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans and women of all groups. The exception is White men, for whom upward mobility has fallen. We also document geographic convergence, reflecting rising mobility in the South and Great Plains and falling mobility in the West, Northeast and Industrial Midwest. Comparing counties across state borders, we find that state spending on K–12 education increased upward educational mobility in the early twentieth century, but state spending on public tertiary education increased upward mobility in the later twentieth century.

Paul Mohnen, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Martha J. Bailey, University of California, Los Angeles, and Abdul Raheem Shariq Mohammed, Northeastern University

A Century of U.S. Newspapers from 1870–1969

Media influences social, political, and economic processes by shaping beliefs and behaviors. Studies highlight newspapers’ role in increasing political participation spreading cultural norms. The pre-radio and pre-TV era offers a clear media landscape for study, with newspapers as primary information sources. However, research often focuses on daily newspapers, overlooking the prevalence of weekly papers.

Peter Nencka, Miami University, Brian Beach, Vanderbilt University, and Ezra Karger, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Public Data Infrastructure and Agricultural Development: Historical Evidence from Soil Mapping

In this paper, I explore a large-scale data infrastructure program in the U.S. history and investigate its effects on agricultural development. Since 1899, the National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) was implemented to offer county-level soil maps and classification data. Using various novel datasets and the staggered publication/access of these soil surveys/ maps across counties, I provide empirical evidence for two key channels of how access to soil information shaped agricultural production. First, by reducing uncertainties in agricultural investment, local soil surveys incentivized farms to adopt fertilizers and machinery, improve the precision of crop choices, and expand farmland. Second, local soil surveys also mitigated cross-institutional coordination frictions, thereby increasing agricultural experiment stations’ innovation activities. As a result, providing soil information can significantly increase local crop productivity but intensify the extent of monocultures. My results highlight the tension between productivity growth and sustainability associated with data-driven technology.

Yiyu Xing, University of California, Los Angeles

The Origins of the Nitrogen Revolution

Natural soil endowments have historically constrained agricultural productivity and population growth. The nineteenth century witnessed technological breakthroughs, such as nitrogenous fertilizers, which alleviated these. In this paper, we examine the introduction and rapid diffusion of guano in nineteenth-century England. We first establish that nitrogen deficiency shaped cropping patterns prior to guano’s arrival. Drawing on newly-digitized agricultural census data and leveraging the discovery of Peruvian guano as a natural experiment, we show that nitrogen-poor areas reallocated their production toward nitrogen-demanding, more profitable crops. These same areas also experienced increases in livestock counts, consistent with a shift to “high farming” practices. The effects are driven by areas with heavy soils, where fertilizers complemented a contemporary drainage innovation, and regions with initially lower agricultural productivity. For future work, we plan to quantify the welfare effects of fertilizers using detailed price data and incorporate textual data to map the geographical distribution of fertilizer use.

Christopher Sims, Northwestern University, and Matteo Ruzzante, Northwestern University

The Great Revolt and Its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy in Colonial India

We investigate the impact of medical mistrust on the success of the British smallpox vaccination campaign in Colonial India. Using archival data we compile a data set on adult and child vaccination rates across 240 Indian districts between 1889 and 1899. We also collect data on smallpox mortality. We show that districts with higher vaccination rates also experienced lower smallpox mortality. We then show that either geographic or linguistic proximity to massacres by the British during the 1857 Great Revolt predict lower vaccination rates.

Noel Johnson, George Mason University, and Malik Hussain, George Mason University

The Long-Term Positive Effects of Trade Integration in Latin America on Exports’ Diversification and Sophistication: 1913–2013

Using a new dataset of exports’ composition by product and destination for 13 countries that extends the analysis to the first half of the twentieth Century, this paper shows that historically a greater level of intra-regional trade has been associated with both a higher level of diversification of the exports’ matrix, and a higher contribution of manufacturing products to total exports in Latin America, in contrast with the effect of higher levels of trade with Europe and the United States. Once the positive effect of intra-regional trade is confirmed by long-term data, a Gravity model is used to empirically identify the main determinants of bilateral trade between Latin American economies.

David Forero, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Innovation and the Great Divergence

The Great Divergence of GDP per capita between the leading regions of Europe and China occurred around 1700 as a period of positive growth in Britain and the Netherlands coincided with a period of negative growth in the Yangzi Delta. The positive trend in northwest Europe was a continuation of a process that began in the fourteenth century, while the negative trend in the Yangzi Delta continued a pattern of alternating periods of growing and shrinking, but reaching lower levels of income. TFP growth was strongly positive in Britain after the Black Death, in the Netherlands during the Dutch Golden Age and again in Britain from the mid-seventeenth century. Although TFP growth was positive in China during the Northern Song dynasty, it was predominantly negative during the Ming and Qing dynasties, in the Yangzi Delta as well as in China as a whole.

Stephen Broadberry, University of Oxford, and Runzhuo Zhai, Renmin University

War and the Origin of Chinese Civilizations, 8000–221 BCE

We posit that warfare could serve as a crucial catalyst for the emergence of civilizations. Leveraging a novel archaeological dataset from China spanning 8000 to 221 BCE, our analysis demonstrates that, at given levels of economic prosperity, the establishment of primitive cities—originating from fortresses—occurred less frequently in rugged terrains but more often in concavely circumscribed areas. Our Difference-in-Differences analysis reveals that these cross-regional disparities in urbanization stemmed from variations in the timing and intensity of warfare, which facilitated early cooperation in city-building initiatives. Moreover, once established, these cities spurred the provision of law and order, alongside essential public goods such as hydraulic projects and protection for long-distance trade. The observed “war—city-building” dynamic transcends prehistoric China and aligns with patterns evident in other early civilizations.

Zhiwu Chen, The University of Hong Kong, Peter Turchin, The Complexity Science Hub–Vienna and the University of Connecticut, and Wanda Wang, The University of Hong Kong

History as Evolution: The Case of China

This paper argues that culture evolves through a succession of historical shocks, each leaving a durable imprint on social norms and values. Focusing on China’s extensive textual records—local gazetteers and poetry covering several centuries—we construct a novel dataset to deeply track shifts in attitudes toward markets, governance, kinship, and morality. Employing advanced text analysis methods, including word embeddings and large language models, we systematically measure cultural indicators across diverse temporal and spatial scales. We highlight key episodes—such as Song Dynasty commercialization, the Taiping Rebellion, and missionary expansion—as natural experiments that illustrate how conflicts, disasters, and institutional changes shape collective mindsets. Our findings show that culture is not static but layered over time, with earlier shocks exerting lasting effects. By integrating cross-sectional snapshots with panel analyzes, this study contributes fresh evidence to debates in cultural economics and economic history, advancing our understanding of how major events drive cultural evolution and influence subsequent economic outcomes.

Melanie Meng Xue, London School of Economics

The Economic and Social Empowerment of Women through Homesteading in the United States

The Homestead Act of 1862 revolutionized land ownership, granting millions access to land and offering opportunities for single women, who constituted 10–15 percent of successful homesteaders. This project explores the determinants of success for female homesteaders and how they leveraged land ownership to achieve social, political, and economic advancement. Using archival sources, I build a comprehensive dataset of successful and canceled homestead claims from 1862 to 1920. This dataset includes claimant details that are matched to the census and location descriptions to identify their actual locations. Using these sources, I combine a matching approach on pre-homesteading characteristics with randomness in plot selection to causally estimate the role of female networks in successful homesteading. I investigate individual long-run outcomes after homesteading, such as labor force participation, marriage patterns, and fertility, as well as broader impacts on county-level outcomes like women’s club formation, voter turnout, government petitioning, and legislative reforms.

Paige Montrose, University of Pittsburgh

Printing and Women: The Gendered Impact of Printing Technology in China

Economists have long argued that technologies can exhibit gender-biased impacts, often emphasizing gender-specific innovations. This study diverges from that norm by examining printing—a seemingly gender-neutral technology—and its gendered effects on human capital formation. Using a panel dataset of woodblock-printed books and poets from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, this research reveals that book production significantly increased the density of female poets, with a less pronounced effect on male poets. An instrumental variable approach, leveraging river distance to bamboo sites (a crucial raw material for printer paper), supports these findings. Further analysis of 1982 census data indicates that printing maintained a female-biased impact on human capital and further improved gender equality in education during the early twentieth century. The results imply that women, with limited access to external educational resources in pre-modern society, derived higher marginal returns in literacy from home-based book consumption than men. This research enhances our understanding of the potential biases inherent in various technologies.

Nina Liu, King’s College London

Coeducation, Female Human Capital, and the Evolution of Gender Norms

We study how the inclusion of women in higher education affects male students’ gender attitudes and generates spillovers on women’s education through men’s social networks. We examine China’s first university coeducation reform at Peking University in 1920. Compiling a comprehensive dataset on university students from historical archives, we compare female educational outcomes in the home counties of first-exposed and last-non-exposed male graduates. We observe an 11.4 percentage point higher probability of having female university students in exposed counties compared with non-exposed counties between 1920 and 1936. The main mechanism is the spread of progressive gender norms through the social networks of male students, evidenced by the positive shift in male students’ gender attitudes and the increase in university enrollment predominantly among female students from the same clan. Our findings highlight the spillover effect of exposure to diversity on real economic outcomes through the exposed individuals’ changing attitudes and social networks.

Yuchen Lin, University of Warwick, and Bin Huang, University of Zurich

Immobile Britannia: Why It Has Been Impossible to Increase Social Mobility Rates in England 1754–2025, and Why That Is Good News

This paper develops methods of measuring intergenerational social mobility that are independent of measurement errors that changed over time and place. These measures show that social mobility rates in England 1754–2025 have been unchanged, and always very slow, despite the enormous social changes across this time interval. For example, the gap in years of education between upper and lower class students significantly narrowed between 1851 and 2022, without changing social mobility rates. The paper shows that these slow mobility rates are explained by a persistent high degree of assortment by parents in social status throughout these years, coupled with an independence of child outcomes from social causes such as birth order, family size, death of a parent, and place of birth. England achieved a surprising meritocracy long before the rise of the welfare state, where only two forces determined child outcomes: inherited abilities and chance.

Gregory Clark, Southern Denmark University

Grim Up North? Regional Intergenerational Mobility across England, 1881–1911

This paper uses a census-linked dataset of between 160,000 to 600,000 father-son pairs to explore spatial variations in intergenerational mobility in England at the end of the nineteenth century. The results show that there is already a north-south divide in terms of intergenerational mobility in late-Victorian England, using rank-based measures of relative mobility and absolute mobility. In addition, mobility patterns exhibit clear differences depending on migration history and origins. Migrants from the North are much more mobile than those that remained in the North and experience significant gains in occupational ranks from migration, while the same pattern is not observed for Southern migrants and non-migrants. The advantages of north-south migration hold even after accounting for selective migration using household fixed effects. Finally, there is also evidence that there was a “Great Gatsby curve” in late-Victorian England, as places of higher occupational inequality were also places of lower social mobility.

Ziming Zhu, London School of Economics

The Social Lifecycle Impacts of Power Plant Siting in the Historical United States

This paper estimates the “social lifecycle” impacts of power plants by combining newly digitized data on power plant siting and operations from 1900–2020 with spatially resolved demographic data from the U.S. Census. Our event study analyzes suggest that long-run residential sorting in response to power plant siting contributes to current disparities in pollution exposure. Pre-treatment event study estimates indicate that initial siting decisions were not significantly driven by pre-existing demographic trends. Post-treatment estimates reveal a gradual increase in the Black population share, with a 7–8 percentage point increase observed 70–80 years after the first plant was sited. These effects are primarily driven by counties where the first plant was established before 1940. Additionally, annual county-level capacity continues to increase 50–70 years after the first plant siting, suggesting that this long-run shift in demographics is not a result of plant retirements.

Karen Clay, Carnegie Mellon University, Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Arizona State University, Akshaya Jha, Carnegie Mellon University, and Joshua Lewis, University of Montreal

Railroads, Market Access, and Indigenous Land Dispossession

The expansion of the United States across North American displaced and dispossessed hundreds of Indigenous nations. Historians have long argued that this process was hastened by improved transportation links resulting from the construction of the railway. In this paper, we explore the question of whether increased market access, as facilitated by railway construction, accelerated the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and nations. Using spatial data containing all Indigenous land cessions up to 1894, we find that increases in market access increased the probability of Indigenous land cessions within that decade. Reductions in transport costs and growing populations in U.S. counties both play important roles in explaining market access’s overall effect. We find evidence that market access-induced dispossession resulted in quicker cessions, greater assimilation, and shorter heights for those born after dispossession. Over the long run, we find higher long-run incomes potentially driven by higher quality reserve lands.

Rob Gillezeau, University of Toronto, Jeff Chan, Wilfrid Laurier University, and Azim Essaji, Wilfrid Laurier University

Survival and Adaptation in the Rural Northeast: Vermont Farms in the Late Nineteenth Century

This article focuses on the mechanics of competition and rural transformation in the nineteenth-century American Northeast. As Vermont farms weathered new competitive pressures, some farms failed, and others transformed. Using newly collected farm-level data from four years of the nineteenth-century agricultural census, this article seeks to understand the extensive and intensive margins of these economic changes. The empirical strategy first documents which farms failed, and which managed to survive. Second, I examine how farms transformed their mix of products, including changing types of animals or arable products or changing the degree of specialization. I also examine whether new products or patterns of specialization emerge with the entry of new farms. I focus on three dimensions that may determine the speed of economic transformation: productivity, market access, and quality of land. The paper contributes literatures in economics and economic history on rural transformation, structural transformation, and the impacts of trade.

Amanda Gregg, Middlebury College

Collusion, Connection and Capture: The Political Economy of Late Tsarist Russian Industrialization

My paper uses the context of Late Tsarist Russia to study how elites and foreign entities affect competition in a late-industrializer. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Tsarist Russia was trying to industrialize. During this time it is unclear to what extent monopolies and collusion permeated the Tsarist economy, and if political elites—the nobility and government officials—influenced anti-competitive behavior. Furthermore, foreign actors could have exploited the same legal set-up as elites. The Tsarist Empire was capital poor, and it sought out foreign investment. Foreign capital and technology could have been necessary for development, but on the other hand there exists qualitative evidence that foreign entities encouraged anti-competitive actions. Using a detailed dataset on corporate charters, manufacturing censuses, and a new dataset on syndicate agreements, I explore the impact of the presence of political elites and foreign actors on collusive activity.

Mariya Sakharova, Aix-Marseille University

Other Glorious Revolution(s): Elite Conflict and Democratization in the Global South

Social conflict theory holds that democratization occurs when an incumbent rural elite is challenged by a rising urban bourgeoisie. However, this theory does not account for democratization in the developing world, where elite conflict remained agrarian. In this paper, we examine demands for democratization in the Egyptian parliament before the British occupation in 1882. Using a new dataset of members of parliament (MPs) and the universe of parliamentary minutes from 1866 to 1882, we test whether rural elite conflict can lead to MP calls for democratization. Our findings suggest that Egypt’s 1876 default that arguably weakened the landed elite, increased rural middle-class MP demands for oversight (constraints) on the executive. These effects are arguably driven by the rising conflict over labor that led rural middle-class MPs to demand institutional reforms that would create a level playing field with the landed elite in access to factors of production.

Mohamed Saleh, London School of Economics, and Allison Hartnett, University of Southern California

Alienated Intellectuals? The Political Consequences of the Educational Revolution in Early Modern England

In 1668, Thomas Hobbes argued that university education fueled the religious and political radicalism leading to the English Civil War (1642–1651). We revisit this thesis, further developed by Curtis (1962), and empirically test whether the educational expansion in early modern England created “alienated intellectuals” who, frustrated by limited job prospects, published politically radical ideas. Using data on 60,000 university students, 800 grammar schools, clerical job openings (CCEd), and published titles (ESTC), we explore how educational expansion affected social mobility, labor market outcomes, and political radicalization. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that grammar school foundations increased university enrollments of students by 10–20 percent. Exploiting exogeneous variation in clerical job openings in students’ home-regions in an instrumental variable design, we further show that adverse labor market conditions for poor students increased their number of radical publications. Our paper confirms Hobbes’s and Curtis’s hypothesis that education-induced frustrations contributed to political instability.

Julius Koschnick, University of Southern Denmark, and Alexandra de Pleijt, University of Wageningen

The Effects of Marriage Bar: Evidence from U.S. Teachers in 1900–1940

Females’ increased participation in the workforce in the past century was the most significant change in the U.S. labor market (Goldin 2006). An often cited, but understudied, reason for females’ increased LFP was the elimination of the marriage bar, a policy prohibiting married women from working. We gathered new data from 1900–1940 to document the prevalence of the marriage bar in teaching across U.S. cities. Using the 1880–1940 Census and a difference-in-differences design, we show that marriage bars decreased the share of married female teachers by 2.3 percentage points (15 percent). This decrease was offset by an increase in single female teachers. We also find suggestive evidence that marriage bars increased retention among single teachers and possibly delayed or deterred marriage, particularly for older women and those exposed to the policy longer. These findings highlight the role of discriminatory employment policies in affecting work forces and workers’ family decisions.

Wenni Yang, University of California, Davis, and Rebecca Brough, University of California, Davis

The Origins and Evolution of Occupational Licensing in the United States

In this paper, we study the determinants of U.S. occupational licensing requirements from 1870 to 2020. Our empirical analysis draws on a novel database tracking the initial enactment of licensing legislation for hundreds of unique occupations, as well as changes to the specific qualifications required to obtain a subset of licenses over time. We first show that licensing requirements are more common and were adopted earlier for occupations whose tasks plausibly pose some risk to consumers. Second, large urbanized states are significantly more likely to produce new policies. Third, among occupations regulated before 1940, licensing requirements appeared earlier in states with more practitioners and where incumbent workers potentially experienced greater labor market competition. After 1980, state-level factors are more strongly associated with the timing of policy adoption. Finally, political organization, as measured by the establishment of a state professional association, significantly increases the probability of regulation.

Nicholas Carollo, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Jason Hicks, University of Victoria, Andrew Karch, University of Minnesota, and Morris Kleiner, University of Minnesota

Organizational Practices and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Jewish Immigration and the Tailoring Industry in England

This paper provides causal evidence on the role of organizational practices in driving technology adoption. We examine a shift in practices in the English tailoring industry, prompted by the arrival of Jewish immigrant tailors fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1905. At the time, English garment production was bespoke, with native tailors using sewing machines—introduced in the 1860s—to increase individual productivity. In Russia, where sewing machines were unavailable, Jewish tailors specialized in ready-to-wear production, dividing labor into specialized tasks more than in bespoke work. Upon arriving in England, they combined the available sewing machines with their organizational practice to scale ready-to-wear production. Using original data on production tasks and firm-level data, we study how this influenced sewing machine adoption and the transition to mass garment production in England. Our findings show that organizational practices are instrumental in integrating new technologies into production.

Yannis Kastis, University College London,

and Hillary Vipond, Complexity Science Hub

The Therapeutic Consequences of the War: World War II and the Twentieth Century Expansion of Biomedicine

During WWII, the U.S. Committee on Medical Research (CMR) undertook an integrated, cross-sectoral effort to develop medical science and technology for war, representing the U.S. government’s first substantial investment in medical research. Using data on all CMR research contracts, we show that although it had mixed results during the war, it left a large imprint on the postwar U.S. biomedical innovation system. Research areas it supported experienced rapid growth in postwar science, especially in new subjects. It also fueled new postwar drug development, influenced medical practice, and gave shape to extramural research funding at the National Institutes of Health. Contemporary accounts of individual CMR programs point to specific ways these investments enabled old and new subjects to grow. The evidence documents the long-run effects coordinated, application-oriented biomedical research can have on science and technology and challenges the influential “linear model” paradigm in research policy.

Daniel Gross, Duke University, and Bhaven Sampat, Arizona State University

Build Back Better Health: Public Housing and the Late-Nineteenth Century Mortality Transition

This paper investigates the contribution of improved housing conditions to the nineteenth-century mortality transition, focusing on the large-scale provision of social housing in rural Ireland, 1870–1919. Using a novel district-level dataset on deaths by disease and age, combined with the staggered implementation of the housing scheme, the analysis employs methods including two-way fixed-effects, triple-difference, and difference-in-difference estimators. The results show that districts receiving more cottages experienced a significant decline in disease mortality, accounting for up to 40 percent of the rural mortality decline during this period. Cause-specific data suggest the effect was driven by reductions in respiratory disease mortality, with no impact on non-communicable diseases. Further analysis reveals that mortality reductions were concentrated among younger cohorts and older females. This study highlights the effectiveness of large-scale public health interventions in rural settings and provides causal evidence linking housing improvements to better health outcomes during the European mortality transition.

Ronan Lyons, Trinity College Dublin, Alan de Bromhead, University College Dublin, and Johann Ohler, London School of Economics

The Consequences of Federal Abortion Funding Bans

In the United States, public funding restrictions prohibit the use of federal funding for abortion services. In this paper, we consider the effects of these initial federal funding restrictions through the Hyde Amendment. We find that the federal prohibition of abortion funding raises fertility by 2 percent for young adult women in counties with high Medicaid eligibility. The Hyde Amendment also disproportionately impacts non-white women, those more likely to be receiving Medicaid. After the Hyde Amendment, there is an increase in non-white hospitalizations for abortion complications, a temporary increase in non-white maternal mortality, and a worsening of non-white economic outcomes (relative to white women). Overall, federal abortion funding restrictions appear to widen health and economic racial disparities.

Nikita Dhingra, Georgia State University, Lauren Hoehn-Velasco, Georgia State University, and Mayra Pineda Torres, Georgia State University

Multigenerational Effects of Smallpox Vaccination

Can the effects of childhood vaccination extend across three generations? Using Swedish data spanning 250 years, we estimate the impact of smallpox vaccination on longevity, disability, and occupational achievements. Employing mother fixed-effects, difference-in-differences, and shift-share instrumental-variables designs, we find that vaccination improves health and economic outcomes for at least two subsequent generations. Causal mediation analysis reveals that these benefits arise from improved health behaviors and epigenetic factors. Even in milder disease environments as seen today, vaccination delivers lasting advantages, demonstrating its long-term value beyond epidemic contexts. These findings highlight the benefits of early-life health interventions lasting for subsequent generations.

Volha Lazuka, Southern Denmark University, and Peter Sandholt Jensen, Linnaeus University