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作者：Lund University; Uppsala University
摘要：We use individual-level income data from archived taxation lists to study top-income earners in Sweden from 1909 to 1950. Using information on 21,055 individual taxpayers in two elite areas in greater Stockholm, we show that top incomes fell in real terms over this period, at a stable pace without obvious connection to the Great Depression or the world wars. The peak of inequality was related to the early stages of a globalized economy with Schumpeterian entrepreneurial profits; the decline wa...
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作者：Utah System of Higher Education; Utah State University
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作者：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors
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作者：Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS); Uppsala University; Lund University; Lund University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)
摘要：This paper documents how the advent of the limited liability corporation contributed to the diffusion of steam technology during Sweden's industrialization. Using longitudinal establishment-level data, we show that incorporation sharply raised the probability that industrial establishments adopted steam. Incorporation facilitated technology adoption partly by enabling smaller establishments to expand to a greater scale, where the use of steam became feasible. These results highlight that low b...
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作者：Northwestern University; University of Manchester
摘要：As late as 1750, Portugal had a high output per head by Western European standards. Yet just a century later, Portugal was this region's poorest country. In this paper, we show that the discovery of massive quantities of gold in Brazil over the eighteenth century played a key role in the long-run development of Portugal. The country suffered from an economic and political resource curse. A counterfactual based on synthetic control methods suggests that by 1800 Portugal's GDP per capita was 40 ...
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作者：University of Zurich
摘要：Early modern urban parliaments suffered an increasing monopolization of political power that hampered urban development. To combat power monopolization, some Swiss city-states reformed their election systems by randomly selecting political representatives from a pre-elected pool of candidates. We implement a difference-in-differences design and find that lottery-based election systems improved the equality of distribution of political seats within parliaments. Lottery-based elections also had ...
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作者：Stanford University
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作者：University of Valencia
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作者：Occidental College
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作者：Stanford University; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD); University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：We inquire how a commodity cartel is created by studying the negotiations between Colombia and Brazil to stabilize the international coffee market in the 1930s. We show how differences among actors involved in the industry within the negotiating countries in terms of land ownership and type of coffee produced, prevented early cartelization agreements. Cartelization was only achieved when four factors converged: financial and infrastructural capability to store excess production, in-depth knowl...
