This article presents new estimates of aggregate production in post-unification Italy: the first since the original Istat-Vitali estimates of some forty years ago not to recombine their component series, and to be based entirely on new research. The new 1911-price GDP series incorporates the recent Federico series for agriculture, the author's recent series for industry, and newly derived series for services that extrapolate the recent Zamagni estimates of their value added in 1911. The new time series for the 11 sectors specified by the original estimates often differ widely from their predecessors. The new aggregate yields a long-term growth rate well above that of the original series, but not as high as that of Maddison's revision. The end-of-the-century acceleration that characterised all the earlier aggregates disappears: total production followed in muted form the long swing in industrial production, which in turn reflected a simple investment cycle. The implications of the new series in the context of the ongoing debates in the literature are also briefly discussed.

I argue that Spain's long-term economic stagnation in the seventeenth century and beyond was the result of a process triggered by the windfall acquisition of precious metals from American mines, and driven by the consolidation of absolutist rule and the peculiar privilege structure of Spanish society in the sixteenth century. American treasure allowed the Spanish monarchs to command large amounts of credit and pursue an expansive imperial policy unlike that of any other Early Modern nation; when the cost of the Empire increased and mineral rents fell, the Crown increased the fiscal pressure while allowing skilled human capital to migrate into the tax-sheltered but largely unproductive nobility. I first provide evidence on the role of the silver windfall and the acquisition of nobility titles in the sixteenth century; of particular interest is a new data series of nobility lawsuits constructed from the population of cases housed at the Archive of the Royal Chancery Court in Valladolid. I then develop a unified theoretical framework that explains imperial policy as an optimal response given the existing institutions and the natural resource windfall, recreates the rent-seeking path followed by the Spanish Crown when mineral rents proved insufficient, and accounts for the long-term economic backwardness that Spain experienced in the following centuries as the result of an institutional lock-in.

This article applies event-study methodology to explore the economic consequences of cartelisation in Imperial Germany. By combining qualitative and quantitative sources it discusses the risk and return effects of the establishment of the allegedly most powerful cartel, the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate (RWKS). Its findings cast doubts on the importance of the RWKS for the development of the German coal industry. The cartel did not affect the major part of a typical mine's risk-the firm-specific risk – and its moderate return effects were mostly confined to larger mines. Cartelisation did not seem to be an important pillar of ‘organised capitalism’.

During the late nineteenth century, technologies to measure the quality of the milk in butter production became available, enabling creameries to pay suppliers of raw milk according to quality. Having identified the advantages to the creameries in terms of incentive provision, we demonstrate that the diffusion among the cooperative creameries was relatively slow, particularly relative to other technologies adopted by the same creameries over the same period, with a large number ‘dragging their feet’. We also observe that late adopters often do not choose the most up-to-date technology and that early adopters who later upgrade their technology in many cases do not choose the current best practice. We consider a number of reasons for the observed patterns, which are at odds with the co-operative creameries being seen as technologically ‘savvy’. A proper implementation created both winners and losers among suppliers, and the size of these widened with newer versions of the technology. We show that the slow and inappropriate implementation can be explained by the need to get the technology accepted by a sufficient number of suppliers.