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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：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...
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作者：Paris School of Economics; Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD); University College Dublin; Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD); Universite PSL; Universite Paris-Dauphine
摘要：What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the developmentalist era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830-1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wag...
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作者：Del Angel, Gustavo A.
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作者：Newcastle University - UK
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作者：Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：The Cold War triggered the appearance of U.S.-sponsored re-distributive policies in Latin America with the goal of decreasing the influence of the Soviet Union. We study how organized groups of workers increased the intensity of one of the largest programs of the time, Salvador Allende's land reform in Chile (1970-1973). Using original data in an event study research design, we find that the local political actions of workers-proxied by land invasions-affected the intensity and location of exp...
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作者：Myongji University; Kyungpook National University (KNU)
摘要：After several hundred years of a closed-door policy, Korea finally opened its ports in 1876. Historians have traditionally claimed that the port-opening was coerced by foreign countries, deteriorated the Korean economy, and led to Korea becoming a colony. We examined this view by measuring biological living standards and find the opposite. The height of the male Hangryu Deceased, who died on the street but whose bodies were not claimed, increased by 1.1 cm from the 1880s to the 1910s. This als...
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作者：University of Calgary
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作者：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：This article analyzes a newly constructed individual level dataset of every English death and probate from 1892-1992. This analysis shows that the twentieth century's Great Equalization of wealth stalled in mid-century. The probate rate, which captures the proportion of English holding any significant wealth at death rose from 10 percent in the 1890s to 40 percent by 1950 and has stagnated to 1992. Despite the large declines in the wealth share of the top 1 percent, from 73 to 20 percent, the ...
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作者：Lund University; Uppsala University
摘要：Will technical change spur conflicts in the labor market? In this study, we examine electricity adoption in Sweden during the first decades of the twentieth century. Exploiting that proximity to hydropowered plants shaped the electricity network independently of previous local conditions, we estimate the impact of electricity on labor strikes. Our results indicate that electricity adoption preceded an increase in conflicts, but strikes were of an offensive nature and most common in sectors wit...
