The present article presents a consumer price index (CPI) for Norway 1819–1913. The CPI is a spliced series of three indices. For the period 1819–1871 a new and original index based on retail prices has been constructed. This new CPI is for the period 1871–1913 spliced with two cost of living indices and thereby stretches up to 1913. Thus, we conclude with a CPI for Norway for most of the nineteenth century and up to World War I.

The CPI reflects the business cycles of the period, with growing prices during upturns and shrinking prices during downturns. The series is compared to corresponding cost of living indices from Denmark and Sweden. We trace high conformity in price movements between the countries. Given the level of economic integration within the Scandinavian Currency Union from the 1870s onwards, this conformity confirms the reliability of the new CPI for Norway.

During the ‘Golden Age’, the high investment rates reached by the European countries have been considered crucial in explaining growth. The literature about the Golden Age has emphasized supply-side explanations based on structural change, the reconstruction effort and the catch-up hypothesis, but also demand-side explanations focused on the effects of demand stability for promoting high rates of investment. In this article we have focused our attention on the evolution of the user cost of capital for explaining the high rates of investment. Our hypothesis is that the increase in investment rates was propelled by the decline in the user cost of capital, the consequence largely of the drop in the relative price of machinery. The embodiment of new technology and the reductions in trade barriers explain this decrease in the relative price of machinery.

This article analyses the impact of the onset of the Great Depression on voting patterns at the local level in the final years of the Weimar Republic. A special pooled longitudinal/cross sectional, fixed-effects approach with spatial autocorrelation (EGLS) is used in order to simultaneously estimate the popularity determinants for the entire system of political parties for each of the 830 localities in our data set. By analysing the determinants for the vote shares of all major parties/party blocs we demonstrate unequivocally that the economic crisis was the crucial prerequisite for the political collapse of the Weimar Republic. In contrast to other empirical studies in this field, we use an essentially longitudinal approach by which we can completely avoid the problems associated with ecological inference and show that unemployment had a strong positive effect in favour of the National Socialists. Because of using aggregated data, we cannot, however, distinguish between egotropic and sociotropic voting behaviour.

The article analyses the rapid development of the Soviet economy during the first three Five Year Plans. A simulation model is used to determine the importance of three distinctive Soviet institutions/policies – the concentration of investment on heavy industry, the collectivisation of agriculture, and the use of ambitious output targets in conjunction with soft budget constraints to guide business activity. It is shown that the investment strategy and the planning system were responsible for rapid industrialisation, including a significant rise in the standard of living. Collectivisation did increase the rate of growth over the 1930s but by only a small amount.

This article challenges the established orthodoxy concerning industrial growth in Greece during the interwar period. A Paasche quantity index weighted by value-added shares for 1938 is constructed and then compared to earlier estimates. The new index indicates rapid growth though not free of interruptions in the 1920s, an early and robust recovery from the Great Depression and high rates of growth in the 1930s. By contrast with earlier estimates which imply that Greece escaped the Great Depression unscathed, the new index shows that industrial output plummeted after 1929. These findings, backed up by alternative tests, suggest that the new index gives the best possible assessment of industrial production in Greece in the interwar period. The article also explores mechanisms that stimulated industrial activity and provoked cyclical collapses of industrial output in Greece in the interwar period.

This paper surveys West Germany's export performance since the 1950s, focusing on geography, the exchange rate regime, and international specialisation. It emphasises the importance of Europe as a ‘natural trading bloc’, with Germany at its centre. It challenges the claim that Germany's export boom of the 1950s and 1960s can be mainly explained by relatively low domestic cost increases. It further challenges the claim that Germany's export position has been transformed from early maturity to relative decline.

This article examines intergenerational wealth accumulation and transmission patterns in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu (located in north-central Anatolia), by utilizing the quantitative information as found in probate estate inventories. Specifically, it explores how sons' wealth levels were determined by a number of factors. Our results indicate that the father's wealth and the duration of wealth accumulation were positively related to the son's wealth. But the number of inheritors and, for the most part, honorary titles did not influence wealth accumulation. In addition to providing valuable insights into wealth accumulation patterns in eighteenth-century Anatolia, our findings allow us to make comparisons with Britain and comment on the process of economic development in the Middle East.

The Great Depression in Germany led to the radicalisation of the electorate, leading the country and then the world into the darkest days of Western civilization. Could it have been otherwise? This article explores whether the NSDAP takeover might have been averted with a fiscal policy that lowered the unemployment rate in those parts of Germany where their support rose most rapidly. A counterfactual simulation model based on estimates of the relationship between unemployment and the radical vote at the electoral district level provides a framework for considering how much lower unemployment would have to have been in those districts to prevent the NSDAP from becoming a formidable political force in Germany. Budget neutrality is maintained, so that the simulations do not depend on an expanded fiscal policy. The results indicate that such a policy could well have averted the NSDAP's seizure of power, and the catastrophe that followed in its wake.

The only thing we owe history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde

This article discusses recent cliometric contributions by German and non-German economic historians to the field of German economic history. After a brief attempt to describe the field in Germany I survey recent work in four specific topical areas – which thus serve as rough indices of the spread and development of econometric and quantitative techniques in the field. I conclude that a German ‘cliometric revolution’ has not yet taken place, but that promising beginnings have been made.

Historical experience is often invoked in the modern debate on competition among reserve currencies, yet little is known about quantitative aspects or institutional features of reserve management. By drawing on newly obtained data on foreign exchange reserves, especially those broken down by currency, this article explores the competition between the British pound sterling and the US dollar for the status of leading reserve currency in Japan during the interwar period. We find that competition between these two currencies remained undecided and that their relative status alternated repeatedly. Historical materials and the results of econometric analysis suggest that the key factors explaining a choice of reserve currencies are trade volumes and the currency denomination of external debt. The latter criteria supported maintaining sterling's status as a reserve currency for the interwar period, reflecting its considerable share in debt service generated through issues that had been launched when London was the sole international market. The stability of potential reserve currencies is shown to be crucial as well. We also find evidence of institutional factors, which include taxation, foreign exchange controls and restrictions on financial activities.

This article constructs nominal and real multilateral effective exchange rates for Britain, France, Germany and the US during the period of the classical Gold Standard, 1879–1913. The new data indicate that the major industrial countries saw trend variations in their nominal effective rates, which appear to have been stochastic in nature, and reflected a significant exchange rate variation with non-gold countries. The movements of nominal effective rates display common trend patterns across the major industrial countries, reflecting similar trading structures in the pre-1914 period. In contrast, the movements of the real effective rates reflect national-specific influences. The implications of the new data with regard to business cycles and the international adjustment mechanism under the Gold Standard are considered.

This article examines the relative importance of sticky wages and sticky prices in explaining the length and the depth of the Great Depression. Econometric evidence shows that the supply failure was an outcome of widespread price stickiness and that wage stickiness only played a minor role as a propagating factor during the first years of the Depression. Microeconomic evidence suggests that there was widespread and increasing industrial concentration during the interwar period.

Germany overtook Britain in comparative productivity levels for the whole economy primarily as a result of trends in services rather than trends in industry. Britain's productivity lead in services before World War II reflected external economies of scale in a highly urbanised economy with an international orientation. Low productivity in Germany reflected the underdevelopment of services in an economy that was slow to move out of agriculture. As German agricultural employment contracted sharply from the 1950s, catching-up occurred in services. This was aided by a sharp increase in human and physical capital accumulation, underpinned by the institutional framework of the postwar settlement.

We investigate the trend and the regional variation in height among German military recruits born during the first half of the nineteenth century. The results show a downturn in height, as in many other parts of Europe and America, particularly substantial for those born at the end of the 1830s. At a regional level, however, major differences emerge from the analysis. First of all, a major height difference between recruits from southern and northern states emerges, probably due to the lower population density and to the specialization in dairy farming in the north. Secondly, time trends reveal at least three different patterns, probably related to the different underlying economic structure: in Bavaria, where the production system was more backward and changed relatively little in the early nineteenth century, heights almost stagnated at very low levels for the whole period under study; in the southwest, characterized by a more dynamic proto-industrial structure, height declined in years of declining grain prices and slightly increased when food prices recovered; in the agricultural north, where the peasants were mainly cottagers working on big estates cultivated with intensive practices, the overall decline in height is much less marked than in the southwest, and the trend moves in a countercyclical fashion with respect to food prices. A separate analysis for Prussia reveals a further differentiation between the west and east Elbian regions: the height of eastern Prussians appears to increase during the 1820s and the early 1830s. As the present sample is mainly representative of non-agricultural workers, the positive trend in the east may be due to both an improved food supply, fostered by a stronger application of the agrarian reforms, and a lower degree of competition among industrial workers, due to a delayed dismantling of the guild systems.

Historians often use the concept of financial revolutions to explain the rise of the Dutch Republic, claiming that innovations in government funding allowed for marked progress in the field of public finance. The article focuses on the medieval precursors of the financial revolution, which the States of Holland brought about when they introduced province-wide public debt in the sixteenth century. The relevant techniques were already known, but predominantly used for political rather than financial purposes. Therefore techniques such as collective responsibility for debt were scarcely implemented. The article hypothesizes that sovereigns made use of the corporate personality of public bodies to increase ties with the main towns of Holland, and thus they used collective responsibility for debt to create stability. This only became a major financial instrument at the turn of the sixteenth century, when a financial crisis forced both sovereign and main towns to reorganize the medieval system of debt servicing. This centralization was crucial for the large public debt the county of Holland created under the Dutch Republic and may even be regarded as a step in the direction of national debt.

This article examines the bank amalgamation movement in England between 1870 and 1914. I assemble data on all publicly traded English bank equities and use a simple finance model to estimate the effects of concentration. Holding returns on English bank stocks declined steadily over the period, which I attribute to a negative demand shock resulting from banks' declining importance relative to other financial intermediaries. Once this decline is accounted for, increased concentration appears to have bolstered bank returns. This suggests that increased concentration may have rendered English banks less efficient as allocators of capital and may have contributed to Britain's industrial decline.

[The amalgamation] movement appears to have by no means reached its limits, and it is neither safe nor easy to predict with any confidence the eventual outcome of a movement of which the development is incomplete. Whether or not … in the course of a few more years all banking business in this country will be monopolised by some half dozen powerful institutions, there seems little reason to doubt that many of the old inducements to amalgamation still operate, and that the closing years of the century will witness a further reduction in the number of existing banks. In any event, conjecture as to the ultimate outcome of the tendency must be mainly based on past experience, and in light of that experience the question of whether the movement is likely on the whole to be a beneficial one must be discussed.1

It took the British iron industry a hundred years to transform from a small producer at high cost in the early eighteenth century, to become the leading supplier of iron products for the world market by switching from charcoal fuel to coal fuel techniques. In a long-drawn transition, the coal-using techniques were transferred to Belgium, France and Germany, in part indirectly with British iron exports embodying the new technology. Behind protective walls in Belgium and France, new ironworks imitated the British model. Traditional ironworks succeeded in integrating only parts of the new technology (i.e. puddling) and increased their productivity by applying modern fuel-saving strategies. Thus old and new coexisted for a long time. The demand for low quality railway iron made most of the British-type ironworks on the continent profitable. From 1860 on, coal iron was produced in ever better qualities which left only niches for the high quality charcoal iron.

The study of monetary phenomena and an understanding of price determination in modern Europe are too often limited by scarcity of good-quality data sets on the evolution across time of such variables as money holdings, income, or wealth. In this article we show that information contained in probate inventories can be extremely useful in circumventing this problem. In particular, we combine a data set of 116 inventories from Palencia (in northern Spain) between 1750 and 1770 with census information (Catastro de Ensenada) in order to create a cross-section estimate of money demand, a first for any period before the nineteenth century. Results provide meaningful insights about relationships among money demand, wealth, urbanization and structural change in a pre-industrial economy; they also highlight the potential of probate inventories for improving our general understanding of the monetary history of modern Europe.

This article presents new evidence on the determinants of short-time working in Britain during the interwar period. Using a selection of manufacturing industries we test the impact that output volatility, the benefit-wage ratio, and trade union density had on short-time working. We find that persistence effects (captured by lagged values of output fluctuation) and gender differences in trade union density were important for a number of industries. However, perhaps our most interesting finding is that the benefit-wage ratio also exercised a statistically significant impact on short-time working. This suggests that the Benjamin-Kochin thesis may be important after all. In other words, the army of short-time workers that existed in Britain between the Wars may, indeed, have been a ‘volunteer army’.

This article examines the effect of total war on inequalities in pay in munitions industries in Britain during World War II. I present new data derived from Ministry of Labour monthly reports of changes in wage-rates, which allows for a systematic analysis of pay inequality by skill category and by gender and age. I also investigate changes in earnings equality using data derived from Earnings and Hours Enquiries and from records of the National Arbitration Tribunal. I conclude that pay differentials – defined by skill, gender or age – narrowed considerably during World War II. For men, the War represented an accentuation of a trend towards greater levelling that commenced in the later part of the 1930s and continued in the immediate postwar years. This was not the case for women workers. During the War years gender pay inequality in munitions industries was substantially reduced, but some of these gains were eroded with the coming of peace and demobilisation. Wartime labour policy was directed toward the deskilling of manufacturing work and this was coupled with both a significant expansion of unionisation (especially among unskilled workers) and institutional and legal changes that strengthened the bargaining position of trade unions. These factors suggest that institution factors worked in conjunction with labour demand effects to reduce pay inequality in those industries crucial for the war effort.