This paper studies the process of labour market formation in the tourism industry in Spain. Results show that tourism regions diverged in their capacity to attract local labour, a factor that led to different compositions of the workforce. In the most dynamic regions, circular migration became a key factor as a result of housing shortages, seasonality and labour policy. Tourism agents promoted these flows by different mechanisms such as recruitment at origin and temporary accommodation. Migration benefited growth of firms, natives' upward mobility and migrants' accumulation of capital. However, inequality in the regional labour market and host society increased.

Did industrialisation improve standards of living in interwar industrial Spain? We seek to contrast this empirically with high frequency data from 1914 until 1936 for the Bilbao area, an emerging industrial centre. Contrary to existing historiography suggesting that overall standards of living improved, we find that welfare ratios remained at the same level and, at times, fluctuated significantly below sustenance levels. Demographic and socioeconomic variables were highly responsive to short-term real wage shocks driven by food price increases and the delay in nominal wage increases. Interwar industrialisation provided improvements, but did not provide protection from recurring deprivations and these may have constituted an important part of future political and socioeconomic polarisation and violence.

In this paper, I address the U-shaped dynamics (a decrease followed by an increase) in the age at first marriage during the twentieth century. First, I show that the U-shaped dynamics have been steeper in Western that in other countries. Second, I find that these dynamics in the West are strongly related to the post-World War II (WWII) economic growth. By contrast, in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries age of marriage was much less correlated across Western countries. I propose a simple model where age of marriage is a function of search frictions and married women's labor force participation. Both factors put together generate U-shaped dynamics as a result of an industrial boom that mimics the post-WWII Western economic development.

We investigate how changes in the sex ratio induced by World War II affected the bargaining patterns of Italian men in the marriage market. Marriage data from the first wave of the Italian Household Longitudinal Survey (1997) are matched with newly digitized information on war casualties coming from the Italian National Bureau of Statistics. We find that men in post-war marriages were better off in terms of their spouse's education, this gain amounting to about half a year of schooling. By considering heterogeneity across provinces, we find that the effects were more pronounced in rural provinces, mountainous provinces, and provinces with a higher share of population employed in agriculture. This result suggests that in these provinces the war caused a more fundamental change in marriage patterns compared to urban, lower-lying, and less agricultural provinces where marriage markets might have been more flexible to begin with.

In 1940, the Portuguese government approved a massive primary school construction plan that projected a 60 per cent increase in the number of primary schools. Based on the collection of a new dataset, we describe literacy levels in Portugal prior to the plan as well as the plan's strategy regarding the location of schools. We then estimate the causal impact of the increase in the number of schools between 1940 and the early 60s on enrolment and literacy, all at the county level. We conclude the increase in the number of schools was responsible for 80 per cent of the increase in enrolment and 13 per cent of the increase in the literacy rate of the affected cohorts.

Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of the size and functioning of the non-bank segments within the credit market has been a great challenge for historians. Notarial deeds are widely available, but typically shed light on the borrowing of relatively well-to-do members of society. Probate inventories and insolvency records do provide insight into the modest loans of ordinary people, but only haphazardly and not for the overall stock of loans. This article exploits an exogenous shock, the Discipline Act introduced in the Netherlands in 1856, which forced lenders to record all unredeemed loans they had provided to a particular group of borrowers: seafarers. The c.14,000 loans that were recorded, in combination with several additional sources, provide a unique insight into the overall size, composition and functioning of a particular segment of the non-bank credit market.

Numerous primary investigators collected and processed long-termed time series on German educational statistics in the context of their studies. As a result, there are a multitude of quantitative empirical studies. On the one hand, there is the project group on German Educational Statistics.1 Its projects were targeted at describing and analyzing the long-term structural changes of the German educational system on a broad empirical and statistical basis. On the other hand, there are comprehensive data compilations of individual research projects, focusing on a wide variety of special educational research topics. The online database “histat” provides central digital access to these datasets on German educational history. Currently, it offers more than 120,000 long-term time series on the German educational system for a period of 200 years. The striking size of the database shows its key importance for researchers in the field of education. Thus, this paper aims to provide useful insights into the background of the database, the special characteristics of the data compilations and their analytical potential. Additionally, examples are given of how the data have already been used by researchers.

This paper examines the short and long-term impacts of the UK referendum on migration flows and migration policy. Even in the short term – before any policy change – the vote will affect migration flows directly and indirectly through both economic and other channels. Post Brexit, two key issues will need to be addressed. Will the UK preserve a substantial measure of preference for EU citizens in any new system? And will policy tilt in a liberal or restrictive direction?

Immigration and free movement are central issues in the UK's referendum on EU membership. Although free movement was a founding principle of the EU, it only became of central economic and political importance after the expansion of the EU eastward in 2004. For the UK, the economic impacts of recent EU migration appear to have been relatively benign, even for the low paid and low skilled. The UK's recent ‘renegotiation’, which focused on the largely irrelevant issue of ‘benefit tourism’, will make little difference. A vote to Leave, however, will potentially take us into new territory for UK immigration policy,

The essential aims of this article are: (1) to measure the magnitude of the crisis of 1803-1805 in the two Castiles; (2) to analyse the causes and consequences of this crisis. Among the main conclusions of this essay we would like to underline: (a) the 1803-1805 crisis led to a fall in the population of Castile of about 15 per cent; (b) the severe rise in the price of grains in those years was due to the bad harvests and the sparse working capacity of the municipal grain stores, but more than anything else it was the collapse of the market for this produce as a result of the prohibition of removing grain; (c) government measures to deal with the crisis were numerous and relatively bold, but not very effective; (d) the strong mobilisation of the people disrupted the working of some of the basic institutions of the Ancien Régime.

This paper investigates the evolution of income inequality in Spain during its transition to democracy, suggesting a method for the correction of under-reporting of earnings and profits in the Household Budget Surveys’ data. The contribution is twofold: the methodological proposal, based on income-expenditure discrepancy and scaling-up to National Accounts, improves on previous work and can be useful for similar historical sources in other countries. Second, its application results in an alternative history of the distribution of income in this case, changing the levels and also the observed trend. Previous literature asserted a substantial equalisation, related to the democratisation process, while after the adjustment inequality in disposable income is shown to have been quite persistent.

The development of postal services has played an indisputable role in industrialization, market integration and state formation. Smooth functioning of these services depended on the existence of a well-paid and motivated body of civil servants. I study the organization of the internal labour market for civil servants in postal services in Spain from 1890 to 1935 showing a career in the postal services offered high entry wages, growing wages over the life cycle, and a secure job until retirement. There were two downsides to pursuing a career in the postal services. Firstly, entry and promotion depended on the expansion of employment. Secondly, nominal wages were upward rigid, causing large real wage losses during WWI.

Before 1936, private insurance against unemployment was mostly run by trade unions. Commercial companies, meanwhile, did not penetrate into this insurance branch, which is probably due to the advantages that trade unions had when dealing with adverse selection and moral hazard problems. Nevertheless, union-based unemployment insurance reached a lower level of development than other private social insurance schemes, like sickness insurance, perhaps because of the financial difficulties that economic crisis involved for unemployment funds. Also, unemployment insurance spread specially among urban and high-wage workers, although coverage rates in Spain were below those of other European countries with higher income levels. However, even in the latter private coverage against unemployment did not reach 10% of the working population. As in other European countries, Spanish unemployment union-funds implemented strict economic incentives to deal with moral hazard, but precisely this hindered the spreading of private unemployment insurance.

This paper estimates original yields for five grains in thirty-three provinces of Spain in the mid-18th century. We observe a strong heterogeneity between the provinces with yields being considerably higher in the north of the country than in the south-east. Although average yields in Spain were below those in other countries of north-western Europe, the provinces in the north achieved yields not far behind the most advanced agricultural regions of the world. The heterogeneity of yields across Spain can be explained by the different climatic conditions in each province. Although all the provinces improved their yields in the long term, the differences between the provinces remained stable until the modernisation of Spanish agriculture around the mid-20th century.

For political reasons, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco limited the number of civilian Spanish workers sent to Germany during the Second World War. Despite agreeing to send 100,000, the number of workers never exceeded 9,550. Their impact on the German war economy was small. This paper demonstrates that, in limiting worker transfers, Franco went against his own economic incentives, considering that the Spanish government was taking a commission from the workers’ remittances. By limiting the number of workers sent, Franco satisfied the Allies’ pressure to minimise cooperation with Germany. In support of this argument, this article offers updated estimates for the number of workers, their skill levels and remittances. It also provides the first estimates of Spanish costs and income from the programme.

Recent research on working-class living standards during the Industrial Revolution has shown that wages do not cover all welfare components — for instance, working conditions, leisure time or the «access rights» needed make one prosper (health, education and freedom). This is why studies have been published in which wages are compared with other living standard indicators. Following this line of research, our paper examines the evolution of welfare among Biscayan miners between 1876 and 1936 by contrasting real wages, Human Development Index and height. An additional contribution of the paper is that we relate the high morbi-mortality in the Biscayan working-class neighbourhoods with market failures derived from urbanisation, a connection not explicitly considered in the literature on living standards during the Industrial Revolution. These market failures were known by liberal politicians because the hygienists urged the intervention of the State to correct or, at least, ease them. However, the town councils in the Bilbao mining zone took more than 20 years to put into practice the measures proposed by the hygienists.

This paper presents a data series on social expenditure in Portugal for the period 1938-2003. The series was built with the aim of identifying and characterizing the most significant phases in the process leading up to the current welfare state system in this country. The establishment of a social insurance (Previdência) in 1935 was one of the founding pillars of the Estado Novo (New State). Reforms to Social Welfare (Previdência Social) in 1962, while in the full throes of the New State, policy measures taken after the revolution of 1974 and a new orientation for social policy following the accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC) in the mid-1980s brought about significant transformations in the institutional organizational structure that provided welfare and conferred social rights in Portugal. To understand this process, knowledge is needed of the transformations to the institutional structures governing the organizations that provided welfare, welfare coverage in terms of the type of benefit and the population entitled to social risk protection, the magnitude of spending on benefits associated with these risks, as well as how benefits were allocated between the institutions. We built a data series for the period 1938-1980, which can then be matched to data already published in the OECD Social Expenditure Database from 1980 onwards. As a result, a consistent series for social expenditure from 1938 to 2003 was obtained. The methodology used to create the series enabled us to measure the impact of the variation in population coverage for social risks and the average generosity of benefits on the relative share of social expenditure in GDP. We present an interpretive reading for the full period, covering the New State and the Democracy from 1974, of the process of building the welfare state in Portugal.

This paper analyses the demographic decline experienced by Spain's 84 main mountainous districts, which cover more than 20 per cent of the national surface and had 15 per cent of the country's total population in 1860. In Spain, mountain depopulation took place later than in other, more advanced European countries. However, once it started, the process was very intense in comparative perspective. Depopulation became a general phenomenon during the second half of the twentieth century as a consequence of significant shortcomings in rural welfare – these shortcomings were related in turn to low degrees of economic diversification and high levels of pertalty on the access to basic equipment and services. Furthermore, depopulation acted as a mechanism for economic selection because it contributed to the disappearance of the traditional peasant economy and the «default» emergence of more diversified patterns.

In this article, we present an analysis of the institutional evolution of firing in Spain. We explain how a certain path-dependence has been created by historical accidents and how this is the mechanism behind the current system of a costly employment at will. The incentives of firms, workers and governments to sustain such a system are also discussed. We show the main inefficiencies of the system: a substantial increase in severance pay, a distorted use of the legal framework, and limitations to give a rapid answer to a big negative shock. Finally, we discuss how the unemployment benefits reform of 2002 can be understood as the culmination of Spain's policy of costly employment at will.