Using data on interbank relationships and note holdings in Pennsylvania, I estimate the probability that a bank will redeem the notes of other banks by the distance separating them. If two banks were separated by 50 miles, there was a 40 percent probability that a bank would hold the notes of another at a given time. At 200 miles, the estimated probability is virtually zero. My analysis of notes discounted by a small-town, Connecticut banknote broker reveals that distant notes were offered by travelers and traders who moved along the era’s principal waterways.

American economic historians generally believe that U.S. modern economic growth began before 1840, was broadly based, and the acceleration was gradual. These claims are treated as conjectures rather than solid conclusions because the census did not publish good economic data before 1840. But the earlier period was not a “statistical dark age,” as sometimes asserted. After 1817, systematic statistics on postal activity were available at the local level at high frequencies. These data shed light on the timing and sources of the onset of modern economic growth, the patterns of regional development, and the spread of a culture of communication.

This paper uses a novel georeferenced cross-sectional dataset to explore which factors influenced the funding of hospitals and dispensaries in colonial India, emphasizing land tenure systems as a cause of regional variation. Where land was owned by cultivators, healthcare facilities received more resources from local public bodies and were better funded compared to regions where land was owned by landlords. In contrast, in landlord regions they received more private donations and subscriptions from Indians.

European fascist regimes have attached great importance to nationalistic families and designed policies to perpetuate them. Most offered policy packages with interest-free loans repayable through childbirth, along with allowances and tax deductions for large families. Using a difference-in-difference approach and Nazi Germany as a case study, we show that these policies may have counterproductive effects due to negative selection mechanisms in the marriage market. The excessive pressure to marry exerted on singles results in lower quality, ultimately less fertile, and more fragile unions. This finding is important as the main European far-right parties today propose reinstating these policy packages.

When did marriage become strongly assortative? I use a uniquely suitable database from Quebec 1800–1970 to provide the long-run perspective necessary to answer this question. First, I develop a novel method that reveals that marriage was highly assortative as far back as the early nineteenth century. Next, I show this matching depends on the individual human capital of women, not just on family backgrounds. Finally, I show that mothers had an effect on child outcomes independent of the fathers. Thus, despite deeply conservative gender norms, marriage matching—and women—have always mattered for social mobility.

Using linked Census Tree records and archival sources, I explore the roles of race and gender in migrant selection and sorting during the exodus of single young women and men from U.S. Southern farms from 1900–1940. Female migration rates, influenced by changes in farm men’s marriageability, rose during the farm crisis of 1920–1940 and exceeded men’s by 1940. On- and off-farm discrimination by race and gender drove differences in migrant characteristics: out-of-South Black female migrants, but not within-South, were positively selected on education and family resources, while White women were positively selected across both destinations.

We measure pre- and post-tax income inequality in Moscow Province in 1811. We collect new data on incomes for 7,399 asset-holding households, including all registered aristocrats and merchants. We estimate the average incomes of 21 additional social groups using financial records from government and private businesses. Combining this data, we construct a social table and measure top-tier income concentration, Gini coefficient, and the Extraction Ratio. Our findings reveal that serfdom resulted in high inequality and extraction levels as well as low social mobility despite of low levels of enforcement by the state. We compare our results with those for 1904 and find that, in spite of emancipation, inequality remained high during the nineteenth century. Those findings are emblematic of deep historical roots and the persistence of high inequality levels in Russia.

With 70 million dead, World War II remains the most devastating conflict in history. Among the survivors, millions were displaced, returned maimed from the battlefield, or endured years of captivity. We examine the effects of such war exposures on labor market careers, showing that they often become apparent only at certain life stages. While war injuries reduced employment in old age, former prisoners of war prolonged their time in the workforce before retiring. Many displaced workers, especially women, never returned to employment. These responses align with standard life-cycle theory and thus likely hold relevance for other conflicts.

How much did France pay for its colonial empire? Did colonies benefit from large transfers from French taxpayers and private investors, or were they, on the contrary, drained of their capital? This paper uses novel budgetary, private investment, and loan data to compute monetary flows between France and the colonies between 1833 and 1962. Public expenditure spent by France on the empire represented only 1.3 percent of its GDP, of which four-fifths was for the military. Trade balance deficits of French colonies were not counterbalanced by large public or private capital transfers from France to the colonies, but by military expenditure from the metropole. Overall, large sums of money were flowing from the colonies to the metropole, a “drain” representing a couple of percentage points of colonial GDP, making French colonies comparable to British India in the twentieth century.

We study the impact of old-age assistance on mortality using the 1909 introduction of public pensions in the United Kingdom as a quasi-natural experiment. Estimating difference-in-differences and an event-time design, we show that elderly mortality in England and Wales declined with the pension introduction. The estimated decline is economically relevant, stronger in counties with more pensioners, and driven by fewer deaths from both infectious and non-infectious diseases. Analyzing full-count individual-level census data points to a reduction in residential crowding and retirement, especially from occupations associated with high mortality rates, as likely channels.

Does the location of a state relative to others matter? We argue that a state’s location can affect its bargaining power, and thus multilateral relations if trade costs depend on trade routes that pass through other states. This is an important, yet neglected aspect of economic history. We show how an exogenous border change—caused by Britain’s intervention at Vienna in 1815—affected the location and trade routes of Prussia and other German states. We find that this border change led to the formation of the first customs union in history, the German Zollverein of 1834.

To what extent do strike threats prompt firms to adopt capital-intensive methods to deter strikes or labor-intensive strategies to maintain flexibility during work stoppages? We introduce a theoretical model that demonstrates how threats of industrial action influence capital investments through relative factor prices and the power dynamics between workers and employers. Using newly digitized data from 3,141 industrial conflicts and collective agreements in Norway during the interwar period, our findings indicate that strikes generally drive firms toward less capital-intensive technologies. This trend is particularly pronounced in conflicts resolved at the branch or national level, where strike threats may appear more exogenous to firms.

The slow adoption of wagon transport in the Andes is a puzzle. We examine it by developing a threshold technology-adoption model calibrated using human and mule energy consumption and unique historical data from a human trail and the first wagon road in the Andes. Model predictions align with historical social choices. Pre-Columbians selected a straight, steep, short route for human porters to reduce energy costs, while the Spanish used it with mule packs. Late nineteenth-century transport demand growth surpassed the model’s threshold and contributed to construction of the zigzagging, gentle, long wagon road route, as well as incentives to build state capacity.

We study how changes in a country’s administrative hierarchy affect development at the city level. We exploit the 1806 Napoleonic administrative reform implemented in the Kingdom of Naples as a historical experiment to assess whether district capitals endowed with supra-municipal administrative functions gained an urban development premium compared with non-capital cities. We find that district capitals recorded a population growth premium throughout the nineteenth century (1828–1911) and experienced higher industrialization both before and after the Italian unification (1861) compared with non-capital cities. We explain our results through mechanisms related to public goods provision and transport network accessibility.

Using a new database of European academics, we build a network of universities that is based on professors’ mobility. We describe how the network was altered following the Protestant Reformation. We focus on fragmentation and on universities’ centrality. Dyadic regressions confirm that geography and vernacular languages were important for mobility, but did not substitute for religion. We compare simulated networks with and without religious identity. Most universities lose centrality in the simulated religious network compared to the non-religious one. As publications per university are correlated with centrality, the loss of connectedness of many universities after the Reformation contributed to their scientific decline.

This paper investigates the relationship between economic conditions and incarceration in the postbellum United States. Leveraging unique administrative prison records in Missouri from 1850 to 1931 and the differential exposure to national agricultural price changes across counties, I find that positive economic shocks reduce prison admission rates for all crime categories, and negative shocks increase prison admission rates, with the relationship being larger for negative shocks. Although racial disparities in incarceration emerged after Reconstruction, with Black prison admission rates five times higher than white rates, I find no evidence that economic conditions affected prison admission rates differently across racial groups.

Between 1910 and 1940, U.S. high school graduation rates rose five-fold, driving twentieth-century economic growth. I explore how the Great Depression’s surge in youth unemployment influenced this trend, emphasizing gender and socioeconomic disparities. Using linked census data and newly digitized city-level unemployment rates, I find that youth unemployment significantly increased high school and post-secondary completion among higher-income boys, while effects on girls and lower-income youths were negligible. These results underscore the role of household resources in leveraging educational opportunities, as financial constraints limited disadvantaged groups from benefiting from reduced opportunity costs.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Public Works Administration loaned 50 U.S. railroads over $1.1 billion between 1932 and 1939. The government’s goal was to increase employment and decrease the likelihood of bond defaults. Bailouts appear to have had little effect on employment, but we estimate that they did increase the average wage of railroad employees. Bailouts are estimated to have reduced firm debt, but did not significantly impact bond default. We find some evidence that manufacturing firms located close to railroads benefited from bailout spillovers.

We study how anti-fascist opposition during Mussolini’s dictatorship affects post-war support for right-wing parties in Italy. We construct a measure of anti-fascism from the universe of recorded opponents, and use newly digitized historical data to resolve simultaneity between the supply of opposition and the demand for repression, leveraging the random assignment of judges to the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State. Stronger local opposition leads to weaker support for right-wing parties decades later. Our model generates predictions about underlying mechanisms, tested using data on collective memorialization and parental voting behavior. The main driver is social transmission of political preferences.

We provide empirical evidence that central banks can mitigate economic crises more efficiently when they extend eligibility for their discount facility to any safe asset or solvent agent. Nineteenth-century France serves as a case study to circumvent endogeneity. Following 1863, an agricultural pandemic increased defaults outside agriculture. We exploit specificities of the discount window to create exogenous variation in central bank access. Regressions show that while the demand shock brought about by the pandemic led to an increase in defaults outside agriculture by 20 percent, this effect was significantly reduced whenever a branch office of the central bank was present.