This paper examines the determinants of migration from 19 southern counties to six major destinations in England and Wales from 1861–70 to 1891–1900. I find that, while the size of origin-destination wage gaps and the distance between origin and destination areas were important determinants of migration flows, as expected, migration was also strongly influenced by the number of previous migrants from an origin county living in a destination. The assistance provided by previous migrants to friends and relatives contemplating migration led to a perpetuation of earlier migration patterns, and helps to explain the continued dominance of London as a destination for migrants in the 1890s.

Understanding the pattern of postwar slowdown in Soviet productivity growth requires evaluation of the impact of World War II and associated shocks. Continuous productivity series for industry and the whole economy are estimated for the period 1928–85. The pattern of Soviet productivity growth was highly disturbed; by postwar standards its underlying growth was slow. Rapid growth and slowdown from the late 1940s through the 1960s and beyond are explained just by postwar recovery possibilities and their exhaustion. Clear evidence of an adverse break in the productivity trend does not transpire until the 1970s.

The article re-examines Sweden's price-level targeting during the 1930s which is regarded as a precursor of today's inflation targeting. According to conventional wisdom, the Riksbank was the first central bank to adopt price-level targeting, although in practice giving priority to exchange-rate stabilisation. Based on Bayesian econometric techniques and the evaluation of new archival sources, we come to the conclusion that defending a fixed exchange rate is hard to reconcile with the claim of adopting price-level targeting. This finding has implications for the prevailing view of the 1930s as a decade of great policy innovations.

Little is known about the size and performance of the Irish stock market in the half-century before 1914. Using data obtained from the Investors' Monthly Manual, we calculate total market capitalisation and construct a stock market index for the period 1865 to 1913. In addition, we also calculate dividend yields, and examine the performance of the market for company debentures. The results show that the Irish stock market grew steadily up until 1897; thereafter it declined markedly. We speculate that this decline may be explained by political developments.

Recent studies of European agricultural history have shown that, during the early phases of economic development, agricultural growth can occur in the absence of major institutional changes. This article extends such a conclusion – of agricultural growth without major institutional change – to the case of Portugal during the period from 1850 to 1950. Based on new indices for agricultural output growth and data on the use of inputs, we show in this article that Portuguese agriculture was not stagnant in that century and that output and labour productivity expanded rapidly, in particular in the decades from 1870–1900 and 1930–50. We propose an explanation for the positive performance of the agricultural sector which is related to the changing patterns in the use of land and in the product mix, and to the growth of domestic demand for agricultural produce.

Did the relatively high level of literacy in Sweden prior to 1850 play any role in agrarian change and economic growth? According to influential scholars, such as Carlo Cipolla and Lars Sandberg, this was not the case. In this article, however, the authors put forward literacy as a transaction technology. Freeholders in the agrarian economy that expanded during the early nineteenth century used it as such and empirical evidence is presented for its significance during the enclosure movement and in the expansion of the rural credit market. The authors also discuss the use of literacy as a proxy-variable for ‘human capital’ or ‘knowledge’ in growth accounting and stress the existence of different literacy cultures. They maintain that the functional literacy of the Swedish freeholders – reading and writing – can be used as a proxy-variable for human capital. That is not necessarily the case with the mere reading ability more typical for women, tenants on manorial land, and the lower agrarian classes. The Swedish example indicates that the literacy variables used in international comparisons actually mirror very different kinds of literacy.

The 1826 Banking Copartnership Act allowed unlimited liability joint stock banks to form freely for the first time. Such banks were criticised by Walter Bagehot because he believed that impecunious individuals would own their shares. As the 1826 Act crucially contained a post-sale-extended liability restriction, Bagehot's view reduces to whether or not this restriction was effective. This article tests the effectiveness of this restriction by using a simple finance model to measure the risk of the shares of limited and unlimited banks, which traded concurrently during our sample period. Using share price data from 1873 to 1888, obtained from the Investor's Monthly Manual, our results indicate that the perceived risk of the unlimited liability banks was greater, and after the general move to limited liability in 1879, perceived risk fell. Furthermore, we also find that, after controlling for size, the unlimited liability banks tended to have a smaller number of shareholders and stickier share prices.

We explore the association between income and international capital flows between 1880 and 1913. Capital inflows are associated with higher incomes per capita in the long run, but capital flows also brought incomes down in the short run via financial crises. Countries just barely made up for these losses over time, so that there is no conditional long-run income loss or gain for countries that experienced crises. This is in contrast to the recent wave of globalization when capital importing countries that experienced a crisis seemed to grow relatively faster over fixed periods of time. Some countries avoided crises and were able to raise incomes with foreign capital. We discuss some possibilities why.

This study deals with the price building process of cross-listed stocks on the most important European stock exchanges in the 1870s. By applying a vector error correction approach we look for cointegration relationships. Obviously, there was already a high degree of cross-border integration. Furthermore, we observe the uncommon phenomenon that it was not the home market Vienna but the foreign market Berlin which was the dominant one in the price-building process. An explanation could be the intense speculation during the 1870s in Berlin. Therefore, cross-listed stocks worked as a vehicle for spreading the ongoing speculation from Berlin to other places.

This article applies event-study methodology to explore the economic consequences of cartelisation in Imperial Germany. By combining qualitative and quantitative sources it discusses the risk and return effects of the establishment of the allegedly most powerful cartel, the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate (RWKS). Its findings cast doubts on the importance of the RWKS for the development of the German coal industry. The cartel did not affect the major part of a typical mine's risk-the firm-specific risk – and its moderate return effects were mostly confined to larger mines. Cartelisation did not seem to be an important pillar of ‘organised capitalism’.

Finland offers a good opportunity to study how international trade contacts were established and how they developed. Having been denied trading rights, several Finnish ports were granted direct access to foreign trade in 1765. The hypothesis is that the old business relations with Stockholm traders, the role played by the shipmaster and the government-based consulate networks were crucial in the development of the merchant network abroad during the eighteenth century. Business networks developed from interpersonal contacts towards interorganisational relationships during the nineteenth century. The business networks were in many cases, especially in the home town and with neighbouring towns, based on kinship or family relations, and they were long-term by nature.

This article examines the historical record of the Austro-Hungarian monetary union, focusing on its bargaining dimension. As a result of the 1867 Compromise, Austria and Hungary shared a common currency, although they were fiscally sovereign and independent entities. By using repeated threats to quit, Hungary succeeded in obtaining more than proportional control and forcing the common central bank into a policy that was very favourable to it. Using insights from public economics, this article explains the reasons for this outcome. Because Hungary would have been able to secure quite good conditions for itself had it broken apart, Austria had to provide its counterpart with incentives to stay on board. I conclude that the eventual split of Hungary after World War I was therefore not ‘written on the wall’ in 1914, since the Austro-Hungarian monetary union was quite profitable to Hungarians.

Internal bank archives are used to examine the nature of English bank/firm relationships during periods of business distress in the decades before 1914. The performance of the banks is examined in the context of theoretical assertions regarding relationship and transaction banking and bank response to the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. New estimates of bank losses on industrial accounts are made. The results indicate that the banks supported their industrial clients during periods of distress by continuing with existing loans but rarely became deeply involved with clients' business. Effective screening of loan applications, the use of short-term loans and of sample collateral stipulations safeguarded against moral hazard and minimised losses for the banks, even with such high risk accounts.

International migration is determined by both economic and political forces. This article examines the influence of economic, demographic and policy variables on British emigration to four principal destinations in two different eras. Before 1914 the economic and demographic forces that drove British emigration can be clearly identified. Had the same conditions applied in the post-Second World War period, mass emigration from Britain would have continued until the early 1990s. But from the mid-1960s these influences became less powerful as they were increasingly inhibited by immigration policies in the principal destination countries. The long-term decline in emigration is largely accounted for by shifts in policy, especially those that curtailed or abolished the preferences previously extended to settlers from the UK.

Having been separated into numerous autonomous states, nineteenth-century Germany was the very model of a regionally diversified process of industrialisation. How the nutritional status of Germans developed during early industrialisation is analysed in this article. With newly available data, average height for birth cohorts 1770–1849 is established for the two German states of Saxony and Wuerttemberg. The development of these heights is compared to the – so far – sole German height trend of this epoch, the average height of Bavarians. The results suggest that, starting with the birth cohorts of the Napoleonic era, the biological standard of living was on the decline across all the three German territories under consideration. An explorative interpretation of the height trend in Saxony reveals that during the beginning of industrialisation a mixture of relatively bad climatic conditions, rising prices of foodstuffs and a persistently falling real income can be held responsible for the rapid and substantial decline of the nutritional status in this pioneering state of German industrialisation. Finally, by the middle of the nineteenth century the Saxons found themselves trapped in a classical type of nutritional crisis.

Economic historians are increasingly aware of the divergence between the development of real wages and GDP per capita in pre-industrial Europe, even in affluent urbanized societies with high wage levels such as the sixteenth-century Low Countries. This article offers an empirical answer to this alleged paradox by merging living standards and real wages with income distributions in a case study of sixteenth-century 's-Hertogenbosch. It provides evidence for an optimistic reading of the living standards of this era despite the modest performance of the urban economy and a strong decline in real wages. The rich sources of 's-Hertogenbosch were instrumental in reaching this conclusion, as they offer proof that the drop in wage labourers' purchasing power was paralleled by a marked decline in social position. As such, their income experience turns out to be surprisingly atypical, and does little to capture the strong resilience of the majority of the urban populace in the face of the early price revolution.

Although the macroeconomics of Latin America during the first wave of globalisation has been largely documented, key microeconomic aspects remain insufficiently studied. This is the case for the process of the foreign bank penetration driven by British and German banks. The article analyses the historical experiences of Chile and Brazil with foreign banks between 1878 and 1913. Based on newly available bank balance sheet data for each country, we searched for evidence of differences in the financial behaviour between local and foreign (British and German) banks as well as possible competition effects induced by foreign entry. In line with the results of the vast literature on the present wave of foreign bank entry into developing countries, we find that, on the whole, foreign and domestic banks behaved differently and that the impacts of British and German bank penetration in Brazil and Chile tended to be positive.

To date we lack reliable data on the degree of industrial investment in the Third Reich. Additionally, our comprehensive knowledge of the quantitative significance of the war-related industrial branches is extremely fragmented. Precise figures are, however, crucial if we are to arrive at a correct depiction of the political economy of the Third Reich. Based on previously neglected sources, it will be shown that, beginning in 1936/7, Germany experienced a spectacular investment boom, primarily targeted at broadening the industrial foundation for war. The findings of this article are relevant to several historiographical debates, calling into question both the older Blitzkrieg account and the conventional view of the armaments miracle.

During the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s unemployment in Britain averaged 2 per cent. This was far lower than ever before or since and a number of hypotheses have been put forward to account for this unique period in labour market history. But there has been little attempt to isolate precisely how the determinants of wage setting and unemployment differed before, during and after the golden age. We estimate a two-equation model over the whole period from 1872 to 1999 using a newly constructed set of long-run labour market data. We find that the structure of real wage setting was different in the golden age, consistent with notions about the postwar consensus, but it did not result in wages that were significantly lower relative to productivity than during other eras. Rapid growth in productivity and world trade together with low interest rates did keep unemployment lower during the golden age than after the 1970s. But the key difference between the golden age and the periods before and after was shifts in labour demand that are not accounted for by any of the variables that are usually thought to determine the equilibrium unemployment rate.

This article analyses three crucial elections which determined the fate of free trade in Britain and Germany. These are the elections of 1906 in the UK and 1877 and 1878 in Germany. We examine the political economy of trade policy by examining the voting patterns of the electorates in their choice of commercial policy. The underlying hypothesis to be explored is that voting behaviour was based on the economic interests of the constituents as determined by the international trade performance of the sector in which they were employed. An econometric model reveals the degree to which the support for and opposition to free trade was based on occupational characteristics and well explains the outcome for Germany in 1877. The analysis for Britain extends previous work by Irwin (1994) by assessing how considerations of turnout, religion and restricted voting rights alter the results of his original model. In 1878 in Germany religious affiliation and turnout played a significant role in the result although not in the ways assumed by historians, in particular the outcome of the election was not determined by the mobilisation of agricultural labourers on the great estates. The results of estimating the model shows that franchise restrictions contributed to the victory of free trade in Britain, but their absence had no impact on the result in Germany.