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作者：Grinnell College; University of London; University College London; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：How were unskilled workers selected and hired in preindustrial labor markets? We exploit records from the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral, London (1672-1748), to analyze the hiring and employment histories of over 1,000 general building laborers, the benchmark category of unskilled workers in long-run wage series. Despite volatile demand, St Paul's created a stable workforce by rewarding the tenure of long-standing workers. More senior workers received more days of work each month, preferenc...
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作者：United States Department of Defense; United States Navy; Naval Postgraduate School; University of Warwick
摘要：We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular primary schooling. Our mediation analysis suggests that non-agricultural income, urbanization, a...
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作者：Yale University
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作者：Sgard, Jerome; Koskenniemi, Martti
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作者：Irwin, Douglas A.
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作者：University of London; King's College London; Fudan University
摘要：As a multi-faceted socio-political movement in twentieth-century China, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) witnessed conflict and social upheaval. This paper investigates its economic legacies, exploiting geographic variation in revolutionary intensity, measured by the number of resulting deaths. Using a newly assembled county-level panel dataset over five decades, we find worse-affected areas performed slightly better at baseline, but were slower to industrialize. This effect was large in th...
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作者：New York University; New York University Abu Dhabi
摘要：Cross sections of coal prices in England for 1695, 1795, and 1842 are used to infer transportation rates by sea, river, canal, and road. The effectiveness of monopolies, the degree of market integration, and the patterns of regional supply of each mining district are then established. The growth rates of productivity in sea, river, and road transport from 1695-1842 are computed and combined with a social savings assessment of canals to measure the overall growth in the productivity of shipping...
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作者：University of Geneva
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作者：University of Arizona; Stellenbosch University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Bowdoin College; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh
摘要：During the late 1930s, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We analyze the maps to explain the oft-noted fact that black neighborhoods overwhelmingly received the lowest rating. Our results suggest that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most 4 to 20 percent of the observed concentration of black households in the lowest-rated zones. We also provide ev...
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作者：University of Texas System; University of Texas El Paso; Middle Tennessee State University; Middle Tennessee State University
摘要：Napoleon Bonaparte revolutionized the practice of war with his reliance on a mass national army and large-scale conscription. This system faced one major obstacle: draft evasion. This article discusses Napoleon's response to widespread draft evasion. First, we show that draft dodging rates across France varied with geographic characteristics. Second, we provide evidence that the regime adopted a strategy of discriminatory conscription enforcement by setting a lower (higher) conscription rate f...
