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作者：University College Dublin; University Saint-Louis - Bruxelles; University of Oxford
摘要：Shipping, central to the rise of the Atlantic economies, was an extremely hazardous activity. Between the 1780s and 1820s, a safety revolution occurred that saw shipping losses and insurance rates on oceanic routes almost halved thanks to steady improvements in shipbuilding and navigation. Copper sheathing, iron reinforcing, and flush decks were the major innovations in shipbuilding. Navigation improved, not through chronometers, which remained too expensive and unreliable for general use, but...
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作者：University of Hong Kong
摘要：From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China?an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and Chinese scientific works, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits stimulated Confucian literati to study science. On average, the literati's scientific works increased four times in prefectures with Jesuit scientists after 1580. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the empe...
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作者：Yale University
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作者：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; University of California System; University of California San Diego
摘要：We argue that falling farm product prices, incomes, and spending may explain 10-30 percent of the 1930 U.S. output decline. Crop prices collapsed, reducing farmers' incomes. And across U.S. states and Ohio counties, auto sales fell most in crop-growing areas. The large spending response may be explained by farmers' indebtedness. Reasonable assumptions about the marginal propensity to spend of farmers relative to nonfarmers and the pass-through of farm prices to retail prices imply that the col...
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作者：University of Warwick; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：The role of cultural distance in market integration, particularly in the developing world, has received relatively little attention. Using prices from more than 200 South Asian markets spanning 1861 to 1921, we show that linguistic distance correlates negatively with market integration. A one-standard-deviation increase in linguistic distance predicts a reduction in the price correlation between two markets of 0.121 standard deviations for wheat, 0.181 for salt, and 0.088 for rice. While facto...
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作者：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
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作者：Utah System of Higher Education; Utah State University
摘要：In the eighteenth century, Haiti was the world's leading sugar producer, but when cane surged in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century, Haiti produced none. Instead, the land sat idle while workers emigrated to work on sugar plantations. I examine the hypothesis that historical property rights institutions created high transaction costs for converting land to cane production. I collect new data on land-use from 1928-1950 and a proxy for transaction costs. The evidence suggests transacti...
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作者：University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University of Warwick
摘要：How do different local policies in a federal system affect local land values, production, and sorting? We study the question exploiting a large historical policy change: U.S. Alcohol Prohibition in the early twentieth century. Comparing same- state early and late adopters of county dry laws in a difference-in-differences design, we find that early Prohibition adoption increased population and farm real estate values. Moreover, we find strong effects on farm productivity consistent with increas...
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作者：University of Regensburg
摘要：This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine's annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that the representative POW's productivity averaged 32...
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作者：Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick
摘要：This paper examines the failures or in some cases near-failures of financial institutions that started the 12 most severe peacetime financial panics in the United States, beginning with the Panic of 1819 and ending with the Panic of 2008. The following generalizations were true in most cases, although not in all. (1) Panics were triggered by a short series of failures or near-failures; (2) many of the failing institutions were what we would now call shadow banks; (3) typically, the source of t...
