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作者：University of Pennsylvania; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); European Central Bank; Bank of Italy
摘要：Due to a dearth of data, nineteenth century lending to sovereign borrowers was a blind date. We argue this is the reason for collateral pledges found in contemporary lending covenants, which enabled not execution, but the production of reliable fiscal data. Lawyers injected collateral clauses in sovereign debt covenants to permit credible disclosure of hard-to-access tax data. The study foregrounds the importance of big law firms as financial intermediaries and information producers. It also c...
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作者：Vanderbilt University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：I study native-born white men's internal migration in the United States over all possible 10- and 20-year periods between 1850 and 1940. Inter-county migration rates-after implementing a new method to correct for errors in linkage-were stable over time. Migrant selection on the basis of occupational status was neutral or slightly negative and also largely stable. But the orientation of internal migration changed over time, declining in distance and increasingly driving urbanization. In the 193...
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作者：Hokkaido University
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作者：George Mason University
摘要：Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that captures the notion that consumption by ordinary citizens poses a status threat to ruling elites. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income-sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling e...
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作者：Uppsala University; Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS); Lund University; Lund University; Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN); Linnaeus University
摘要：This paper examines the identity and origins of Swedish inventors prior to WWI, drawing on the universe of patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during Sweden's industrialization can largely be attributed to a small industrial elite belonging to the upper-tail of the economic, educational, and social status distribution. Analyzing children's opportunities to become inventors, we show that inventors were disproportionately drawn from privileged family bac...
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作者：European University Institute; European University Institute
摘要：What was the impact of urban political structure on preindustrial wealth inequality? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher inequality in a panel of early-modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that macro-relationship, I construct a unique individual-level panel dataset on personal wealth and political office-holding in the city-state of Nordlingen (1579-1700). I employ a difference-in-differences setting to show that political elites...
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作者：Columbia University; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as befo...
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作者：University of Oxford; University of Bologna
摘要：We provide decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the Russian Empire from the 1690s to the 1880s, making it possible for the first time to compare the economic performance of one of the world's largest economies with other countries. Significant Russian economic growth before the 1760s resulted in catching-up on northwest Europe, but this was followed by a period of negative growth between the 1760s and 1800s and stagnation from the 1800s to the 1880s, leaving late-nineteenth century Russia f...
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作者：Banco de Espana; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); CSIC - Institut d'Analisi Economica (IAE); Barcelona School of Economics
摘要：This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain from 1905-1945. We find that the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the reasons for this shift through a natural language processing method, which allows us to leverage expert opinion to track specific issues in our newspaper archives. We find a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of ...
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作者：[Anonymous]
