The market for company stock in Ireland entered its formative period in the mid 1820s with the incorporation of banks and railways. Using data obtained from stockbroker lists, we estimate market capitalisation and construct weighted and unweighted monthly stock market indices for the period 1825–64. Our findings show that the market appears to have been relatively unaffected by the Famine. We suggest that an efficient-market explanation may better explain this finding than a dual-economy explanation. Our findings also show that the stock market increased significantly in value in the post-Famine period. This finding is consistent with an increase in demand for financial assets as well as the rapid commercialisation of the Irish economy.

In this article, we investigate the information efficiency of the Berlin stock exchange using returns of a new daily stock-market index for the years 1892–1913. We focus on the impact of the 1896 stock exchange law and of the increases of the stock-market turnover tax in 1894 and 1900 on information efficiency. We fit an ARMA(0,1)-GARCH(1,1) model to the data and search for structural breaks. This approach yields no convincing evidence that the tax increases had a negative influence on weak information efficiency. In addition, the restriction of derivative trading by the 1896 stock exchange law did not result in measurable changes in the autocorrelation of daily returns.

This article presents econometric evidence of integration in rural and urban wages in Russia's Northwest in the late tsarist era. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to co-integration and error correction modelling, we show the flexibility of the rural wage in response to the lagged rural/urban wage ratio. Applying the model developed by Boyer and Hatton (1994) and Hatton and Williamson (1991a, 1991b, 1992), we show the similarity of the wage gap in northwest Russia in the late tsarist era to that during industrialisation in the US, England and Western Europe. Although our evidence does not necessarily describe countrywide trends, it does support for an industrialising region the more positive view of the degree and nature of late tsarist economic growth. Growth was not slowing down, and there is little evidence of constraints on migration by traditional agrarian institutions.

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this article we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300–1861. Using an existing data set, we perform panel estimations where the development of city size and urban patterns can be explained by various geographical, institutional and other determinants of city size for the period under consideration. Although large shocks such as the plague epidemics are clearly visible in the data, our baseline estimation results show that the main determinants of Italian city growth are physical geography and the predominance of capital cities. With respect to geography, being a seaport or having access to navigable waterways increases city size whereas a city's relative location, measured by its urban potential, is not significant. Being a capital city also increases city size. The estimation results reveal strong century-specific effects on city growth and these effects differ markedly between the North and South of Italy. Additional estimations show that these time effects can be linked to the political and institutional developmental changes over time in Italy. Our findings that the capital city bonus increases and non-capital cities suffer when the political power and the institutions of the state are more centralised corroborate the idea that institutions are a key factor in explaining Italian city growth.