We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on mortality and economic activity across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The combination of fast and stringent NPIs reduced peak mortality by 50 percent and cumulative excess mortality by 24 to 34 percent. However, while the pandemic itself was associated with short-run economic disruptions, we find that these disruptions were similar across cities with strict and lenient NPIs. NPIs also did not worsen medium-run economic outcomes. Our findings indicate that NPIs can reduce disease transmission without further depressing economic activity, a finding also reflected in discussions in contemporary newspapers.

Black and white Americans tend to have different names today. This divide was long in the making. I show that the racial divergence in naming patterns was a gradual and continuous process spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I then exploit the migration of households from the South to determine if place matters for name choices. Children born after their households moved receive names that are less black or more white than their older siblings, a difference that widens with time spent outside the South. This may reflect the cultural assimilation of households rather than a response to economic incentives.

This article uses new linked full-count census data for Canada to document intergenerational occupational mobility from 1871 to 1901. We find significant differences among Canadian regions and language groups, with linguistic minorities experiencing notably lower rates of intergenerational mobility. International comparisons place Canada midway between other economies in the Americas and the most mobile European societies. Decompositions of overall mobility show that the Canadian experience shared the New World feature of high mobility from manual occupations, but also the Old World feature of greater persistence in white-collar jobs.

This study looks at the valuation of U.K. investment trusts for the 50 years following their appearance as companies in the 1880s. Based on a large and unique dataset compiled from primary sources, our calculations reveal a huge variation between the ordinary share prices of investment trusts and their underlying net asset “fundamental” values. This mismatch is a well-known puzzle in modern financial markets and has attracted a large volume of research because it casts doubt on the concept of market efficiency. We investigate possible explanations for this pricing puzzle and shed light on U.K. investor behavior before the 1930s.

New data are used to construct a time series of real GDP in Germany for the period 1500–1850 using an indirect output estimation technique that relies on wages, prices, and sectoral employment. Until the mid-seventeenth century, real GDP per capita moved inversely with population. The eighteenth century saw a modest rise in output per head. From the late 1810s, economic growth gradually accelerated. The results shed new light on the reversal of fortunes in early modern Europe and the transition from a Malthusian regime to modern economic growth.

Dublin experienced a marked stagnation in population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, accompanied by decaying infrastructure and poor public health. Historians have emphasized that this crisis was coupled with poor governance of the city of Dublin—manifested by eroding public services together with increasing tax burdens to counteract growing debt. This paper studies the municipal boundary expansion of Dublin in 1901, which occurred as a way to alleviate the city’s financial distress. It saw multiple relatively wealthy townships annexed by the city via royal order to increase Dublin’s tax base. Using a sample of census records matched to city streets, we show that wealthy residents and Protestant residents were more likely to leave annexed areas compared to areas that remained independent. Moreover, we offer anecdotal evidence that at least some of the wealthy Protestant households departing annexed townships sorted into jurisdictions that remained independent. Our findings offer support to arguments that the municipal annexation by the city of Dublin may have accelerated the decline of annexed areas in the early twentieth century and contributed to municipal fragmentation in metropolitan Dublin.

This paper investigates part-year factory operation, a common but understudied dimension of industrializing economies, in a prototypical late-industrializing setting that offers rich factory-level data: Imperial Russia. Newly compiled data provides detailed descriptions of all Russian manufacturing firms operating in 1894 and shows that factories operating a greater number of annual working days were more mechanized, more urban, more likely to employ women and children, more productive, and more likely to survive. Rather than arguing that part-year operation demonstrated Russia’s uniquely inexorable backwardness, we stress operating time’s relationship to fundamental drivers of growth, including urbanization, geography, and institutions.

This paper studies the average and heterogeneous effects of railway access on parish-level population, income, and industrialization in Württemberg during the Industrial Revolution. We show that the growth-enhancing effect of the railway was much greater in parishes that were larger and more industrial at the outset. However, such early industrial parishes were rare in the relatively poor German state. This might explain why we find small average growth effects, which only increase at the end of the nineteenth century. Heterogeneity in the impact of the railway thus increased economic disparities within Württemberg and contributed to the state’s relatively sluggish growth.