The prize for the best dissertation on topics outside of North America is named after the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron, who was professor of economics at Harvard University for the latter half of his life. Professor Gerschenkron was a Russian born, Austrian trained scholar, who applied his wide-ranging knowledge to studying the problems of modern economic development. He served as mentor to many of the most distinguished members of our association and was a godfather to the Cliometrics movement. His lively interest in European economic history was said to have been especially appropriate to a man who spoke half a dozen languages, and often claimed to speak half a dozen more.

He would no doubt be extremely pleased to hear the work of the three finalists for this year's thesis prize named in his honor. Although non-North American theses are usually less numerous than those devoted to the study of the New World, this year's competition was exceptional and saw 13 submissions, with one having been partially written in French. Although it is clichéd to say so, this year's competition was unusually stiff and any one of the three finalists would have been a worthy recipient of the prize for best thesis. Indeed, I dare say that all three would have been serious contenders for the prize in any recent competition.

One of the more remarkable changes has been the way in which the choice of topic has evolved. In the 1960s and early 70s, when the Cliometric movement was at its height, the state-of-the-art research was focused on tackling the problem of historical development with the tools of modern economics and statistics that had only just begun to enter the analytical historian's toolbox. Conceptually, the early Cliometricians struggled to place their studies within the leading paradigms of economic development derived from the neoclassical synthesis of Keynesian macroeconomics and neoclassical microtheory that characterized the growth theories of Samuelson and Solow, and that received their expression within economic theory in the writings of Walt Rostow and Gerschenkron himself.

As the neoclassical synthesis has fallen out of favor, and as we have turned away from narrowly economistic explanations of economic change, the emphasis on grand macroeconomic aggregates has declined. In its place has come a greater interest in institutions and the role of the state in promoting or retarding economic performance. Directly or indirectly inspired by the work of Coase, North, Olson, and scholars in the public choice tradition, today's economic historians are more likely to focus on issues of institutional design, the interplay between regulation and performance, the role of rent-seeking, and institutional selection within a broader long run bounded by changes in demographics and technology. It is now commonplace, and fairly uncontroversial in our field, to assume that all actors behave rationally, or nearly so, and that poor outcomes are more likely the product of maximizing responses to inefficient or perverse constraints.

All three of the finalists for this year's thesis prize have produced work that exemplifies this newer thinking, and have shown how well sophisticated theory and technique can be deployed to examine profound historical questions of lasting scientific interest.

Daniel Bogart focused his attention on the turnpike trusts in eighteenth-century England as a means of understanding what role the state plays in enhancing economic performance through timely institutional innovation. He wishes to confront both the descriptive question of how turnpike trusts were promoted and operated as well as the counterfactual question of their importance in bringing about the transportation revolution that is often said to have been a critical element in the Industrial Revolution. Bogart's accomplishment is the creation of quantitative series on aggregate road expenditure by village based on material from highway taxes, village account books, and total village expenditures in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He also showed through an examination of roads that remained under the traditional village system, that the turnpike trusts did much to encourage road investment throughout the eighteenth century. Bogart also did much to examine the theoretical significance of the trusts and to suggest why they were a superior investment-promoting institution than the earlier arrangements. Where his dissertation is weakest is in arguing against the notion that road expenditure over the long run was not simply driven by general economic demand and changing technology and in showing quite clearly that without the trusts, the transportation revolution would have faltered in an economically significant fashion.

Tracey Dennison's thesis is another example of how a detailed examination of a micro-historical case can shed light on broad issues of economic development. Her work is a demographic study of the serf estate of Voschchaznikovo in Russia from 1750–1860 to test the dominant view in Russian historiography that serfdom represented a particular type of traditional society, with serfs being indifferent or hostile to private property and market transactions, while suffering from social and geographic immobility that hindered the modernization and growth of Russian agriculture. This debate mirrors a larger debate in the social science literature about the existence of a traditional, “moral” economy prior to the advent of industrialization. Where the economic historical literature has tended to come down on the side of the “rational peasant” the historiography of Russia is still dominated by the writings of scholars such as Chayanov, who emphasized the peculiarities of peasant culture.

Denison's work flatly contradicts this view. Peasant behavior in Russia was not very different from what we have observed in the rest of Europe. They participated in the land and labor markets at multiple levels, they were geographically mobile, and did not necessarily live in a stereotypical multigenerational household. Many of the more “collective” aspects of peasant life were actually imposed on the communes by the rules of the state regarding taxation and the like.

If there is a greater failing to this work, it is the fact that Denison does not do much to tie her findings to the great debates in economic history. What role did the 1861 reforms really have in promoting agricultural productivity? How did the evolution of peasant behavior match the changes in property rights throughout the late nineteenth century? What should our views be of the importance of the Stolypin reforms of 1905 on the overall modernization of Russian agriculture?

Mauricio Drelichman takes us back to a longstanding, but still unsettled question in economic history: Why did imperial Spain fail? And what role did her conquest and management of Latin America play in creating institutions that affected the abysmal showing of the Spanish economy from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century?

Drelichman's is really two very different theses held together by a desire to grapple with a large and important topic. Drelichman's is the most technically sophisticated of the three thesis finalists and the first part of his dissertation is a skillful and rigorous demonstration that the discovery of American silver produced a shock that undermined the comparative advantage of Spain, a negative outcome of a positive surprise that is known in the theoretical literature as the Dutch Disease. Using a Markov-switching regression model, Drelichman finds evidence of a rise in the price of nontradeables that is consistent with the Dutch Disease story. He then goes on to push a claim that over-reliance on this silver contributed to Spain's bankruptcies and subsequently troublesome fiscal straits.

The second part of the thesis is a very different enterprise with Drelichman trying to create a model of rent-seeking in Spain that would account for the long-run underperformance of the Spanish economy. Although no one will be shocked to hear an argument that perverse institutions had an important role in the problems of Spanish economic development, Drelichman undercuts his fine work somewhat by insisting on tying this section to the Dutch Disease story. Ultimately he tries to lay much of the blame for the long-run failure of Spain on the Dutch Disease effects and related consequences that he worked so hard to demonstrate in the earlier section. Although not impossible, the connection seems tenuous at best. The kinds of mechanisms that produce Dutch Disease effects are really quite different from the institutional feedback mechanisms that Drelichman and other scholars have postulated as resulting in the negative effects of colonialization on the mother country. If the link really is there, the case will have to be made with stronger logic and evidence in future work.

Notwithstanding the criticisms I may have leveled at the three authors, the theses I have examined were clearly the work of mature and innovative scholars. There is no doubt that all three are likely to have productive careers ahead of them. We have rarely been blessed with such an evenly matched set of finalists for the thesis award. Their work will bear close scrutiny in the future, and we should all welcome them into the community of scholars.