The paper analyzes family-level wealth inequality and social mobility in Dudelange (Luxembourg) over five generations between 1766 and 1872, a period that saw the end of feudal social relations. While the integration of Luxembourg into the French revolutionary regime produced a reduction in the Gini coefficient for the ownership of land, the social mobility analysis reveals a relative stability of family positions within the land-wealth distribution throughout the period. This shows that family-level transmission mechanisms limit social mobility and strongly advantage those with ancestors owning property wealth, even when there are significant changes in the organization of property relations.

This paper examines the identity and origins of Swedish inventors prior to WWI, drawing on the universe of patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during Sweden’s industrialization can largely be attributed to a small industrial elite belonging to the upper-tail of the economic, educational, and social status distribution. Analyzing children’s opportunities to become inventors, we show that inventors were disproportionately drawn from privileged family backgrounds. However, innovation was a path to upward mobility for the middle- and working-class children that managed to overcome the barriers to entry.

Elites were pivotal for Latin America’s modernization, yet granular evidence of their industrial entrepreneurship is limited. I study Antioquia, an early center of industrialization, from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Analyzing elite interactions via newfound archival data and exploiting unexpected deaths as exogenous shocks, I find global connectivity—not local—drove industrial entrepreneurship. This suggests diverse resources unavailable in markets but accessible through global connections were crucial in forming industrial ventures. Thus, this paper depicts how social capital shapes elite outcomes.

We provide decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the Russian Empire from the 1690s to the 1880s, making it possible for the first time to compare the economic performance of one of the world’s largest economies with other countries. Significant Russian economic growth before the 1760s resulted in catching-up on northwest Europe, but this was followed by a period of negative growth between the 1760s and 1800s and stagnation from the 1800s to the 1880s, leaving late-nineteenth century Russia further behind the West than at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

I investigate the effects of trade on labor coercion under the dual-coercive institutions of slavery and state coercion. Employing novel data from Egypt, I document that the cotton boom in 1861–1865 increased both imported slaveholdings of the rural middle class and state coercion of local workers by the elite. As state coercion reduced wage employment, it reinforced the demand for slaves among the rural middle class. While the abolition of slavery in 1877 increased wages, it did not affect state coercion or wage employment. I discuss the political effects of the abolition as a potential explanation for these findings.

“The barbarism of the [U.S.] South, while destroying itself, [appeared] in the providence of God to be working out the regeneration of Egypt.”

North American Review 98, no. 203 (1864, p. 483), quoted in Earle (1926)

This paper uses a new linked sample constructed from full-count census data of 1851–1911 to revise estimates of intergenerational occupational mobility in England. I find that conventional estimates of intergenerational elasticities are attenuated by classical measurement error and severely underestimate the extent of father-son association in socioeconomic status. Instrumenting one measure of the father’s outcome with a second measure of the father’s outcome raises the intergenerational elasticities (β) of occupational status from 0.4 to 0.6–0.7. Victorian England was therefore a society of limited social mobility. The long-run evolution and international comparisons of social mobility in England are discussed.

This paper analyzes and documents a new long-term income inequality series for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela based on dynamic social tables with four occupational groups. This enables the calculation of comparable Overall (four groups) and Labor Ginis (three groups) with their between- and within-group components. The main findings are the absence of a unique inequality pattern over time; country outcomes characterized by trajectory diversity and level divergence during industrialization and by commonality and convergence post-1980; the occurrence of inequality-leveling episodes with different timing and length; and significant changes in trends, but also evidence indicating persistence. The income-inequality dataset is included as supplementary material.

I reconstruct the historical performance of individual portfolios owned by Parisian investors during the French Belle-Epoque, which was characterized by a massive concentration of wealth. Using the value of inherited bequests as a proxy for ex ante wealth, I show that wealthier investors not only exhibited greater betas and thus benefited from the bull market, but also captured positive alphas, which translated into greater Sharpe ratios. Their performance was enhanced by diversification tilted toward equity and foreign assets. I identify heterogeneity in returns as a significant driver of the rise of wealth inequalities during the Belle-Epoque.

Within the turmoil of the Norman Conquest, did religious institutions affect the economic outcomes of their land? Exploiting historical data about the changes in holdings’ lordship that occurred after the Conquest, we compare the economic performance of estates controlled by different types of lords. Holdings controlled by Benedictine monasteries (vis-à-vis secular lords) experienced a better performance, although, once accounting for the unchanging upper level of the feudal structure, we cannot fully disentangle this effect from the persistence of Benedictine Overlordship. A comparison with Celtic monasteries, with a different organizational structure, suggests a role for the governance structure of Benedictine monasteries.

How do external threats to state sovereignty benefit local development? In this paper, we look at Thailand’s railroad projects in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as an example of a state’s strategic response to colonial encroachment. By transporting government officials and establishing a permanent administrative presence, the railways served to ensure Thailand’s sovereignty over peripheral regions and bring them under direct governance. These regions, long considered economically unviable and disconnected from Bangkok, gained rail access due to their strategic importance and, in turn, witnessed urbanization and increased agricultural production.

This paper examines the international role of sterling during the Bretton Woods era and argues that it was not a competitor to the U.S. dollar. I construct a novel dataset to measure the reserve role of sterling in Europe and sterling area countries. The postwar reserve role of sterling was limited to the sterling area and was artificial as this area was built as a captive market. I document how British authorities imposed exchange controls, commercial threats, and economic sanctions on sterling area countries to compel them to keep their foreign exchange reserves in sterling.

This paper highlights the importance of endogenous changes in the foundations of legitimacy for political regimes. It focuses on the central role of legitimacy changes in the rise of constitutional monarchy in England. It first defines legitimacy and briefly elaborates a theoretical framework enabling a historical study of this unobservable variable. It proceeds to substantiate that the low-legitimacy, post-Reformation Tudor monarchs promoted Parliament to enhance their legitimacy, thereby changing the legislative process from the “crown and Parliament” to the “crown in Parliament” that still prevails in England. The break with Rome permanently altered England’s political development.

The Industrial Removal Office funded 39,000 Jewish households to leave enclave neighborhoods in New York City from 1900 to 1922. Compared to neighbors with the same baseline occupation, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after relocation. These gains persisted to the next generation. Benefits increased with more years spent outside of an enclave. Participants were more likely to speak English, and married spouses with less Jewish names. More Jewishly-identified men (as measured by own names) were more likely to return to the city. We contextualize these results with new national evidence on Jewish economic and cultural assimilation.

What was the impact of urban political structure on preindustrial wealth inequality? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher inequality in a panel of early-modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that macro-relationship, I construct a unique individual-level panel dataset on personal wealth and political office-holding in the city-state of Nördlingen (1579–1700). I employ a difference-in-differences setting to show that political elites enriched themselves substantially, increasing inequality. To address endogeneity concerns, I exploit the Thirty-Years’ War as a shock to elites’ potential for enrichment from public office. Officials manipulated this crisis to enrich themselves further.

This paper examines how the worship of ancient wisdom affects economic progress in historical China, where the learned class embraced classical wisdom for millennia but encountered the shock of Western industrial influence in the mid-nineteenth century. Using the number of sage temples to measure the strength of classical worship in 269 prefectures, I find that classical worship discouraged intellectuals from appreciating modern learning and thus inhibited industrialization between 1858 and 1927. By contrast, industrialization grew faster in regions less constrained by classicism. This finding implies the importance of cultural entrepreneurship, or the lack thereof, in shaping modern economic growth.

Economists ignore caring labor since most is provided unpaid. Disregard is unjust, theoretically indefensible, and probably misleading. Valuation requires estimates of time spent and the replacement or opportunity costs of that time. I use the maintenance costs of British workers, costs which cover both the material inputs into upkeep and the domestic services needed to turn commodities into livings, to isolate the costs of paid domestic labor. I then impute the value of unpaid domestic labor from these market equivalents, and aggregate across households without domestic servants. Historically, unpaid domestic labor represented c. 20 percent of total income, a contribution that suggests the need to revise some standard narratives.

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that captures the notion that consumption by ordinary citizens poses a status threat to ruling elites. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income—sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face a greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a new dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws.

It is unfortunately an established fact that both men and womenfolk have, in utterly irresponsible manner, driven extravagance in dress and new styles to such shameful and wanton extremes that the different classes are barely to be known apart.

We study art markets in the Greco-Roman world to explore the origins of artistic innovations in classical Greece and the mass production of imitative works in the Roman Empire. Economic factors may have played a role, on one side fostering product innovations when a few rival Greek city-states competed, outbidding each other to obtain higher-quality artworks, and on the other side fostering process innovations when a large integrated market promoted art trade across the Mediterranean Sea. The evidence on art prices is consistent with this. Literary evidence on classical Greek painting from V–III centuries BC (largely from Pliny the Elder) shows that the real price of masterpieces increased up to the peak of creativity reached with Apelles. Epigraphic evidence on Roman sculpture from I–III centuries AD (largely from inscriptions at the base of statues) shows that the real price of statues was stable and largely equalized across the imperial provinces.

This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain from 1905–1945. We find that the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the reasons for this shift through a natural language processing method, which allows us to leverage expert opinion to track specific issues in our newspaper archives. We find a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues like socio-economic conflict. This holds even when exploiting content differences between the two newspapers in our corpus.

Due to a dearth of data, nineteenth century lending to sovereign borrowers was a blind date. We argue this is the reason for collateral pledges found in contemporary lending covenants, which enabled not execution, but the production of reliable fiscal data. Lawyers injected collateral clauses in sovereign debt covenants to permit credible disclosure of hard-to-access tax data. The study foregrounds the importance of big law firms as financial intermediaries and information producers. It also contributes a new view on the role played by contracts in sovereign debt.