The growth of American governments in the twentieth century included large increases in funds for social insurance and public assistance. Social insurance has increased far more than public assistance, so “rise in the social insurance state” is a far better description of the century than “rise in the welfare state.” The United States has increased total spending in these areas as much or more as have European countries, but the U.S. spending has relied less heavily on government programs. In the U.S. states largely determine the benefits for many of the public assistance and social insurance programs, leading to large variation in the benefits across the country. I develop estimates of these benefits across time and place and compare them to the poverty line, manufacturing earnings and benefits, state per capita incomes in the US, as well as GDP per capita in countries throughout the world.

We exploit the records of a large Toledan hospital to study the compensation of female labor and the gender wage gap in early modern Castile in the context of nursing—a non-gendered, low-skill occupation in which men and women performed the same clearly defined tasks. We employ a robust methodology to estimate the value of in-kind compensation, and show it to constitute a central part of the labor contract, far exceeding subsistence requirements. Patient admissions records are used to measure nurse productivity, which did not differ across genders. Female compensation varied between 70 percent and 100 percent of male levels, with fluctuations clearly linked to relative labor scarcity. Contrary to common assumptions in the literature, we show that markets played an important role in setting female compensation in early modern Castile. The sources of the gender disparity are, therefore, likely to be found in the broader social and cultural context.

We study the economic and political determinants of the Southern secession movement of 1860/61. While economic historians emphasize the importance of slavery to the South’s economy as the primary factor behind the movement, we demonstrate the important role that political inequality among whites played in facilitating secession. In particular, secession was decided in state conventions, which allowed secessionists to exploit biases to representation and may have been pivotal in Alabama and Georgia. Our results suggest that the region’s investment in slavery alone may not be sufficient to explain the electoral success of the movement in the largest Lower South states.

We show that the sale of state-owned firms in dictatorships can help political corporations to emerge and persist over time. Using new data, we characterize Pinochet’s privatizations in Chile and find that some firms were sold underpriced to politically connected buyers. These newly private firms benefited financially from the Pinochet regime. Once democracy arrived, they formed connections with the new government, financed political campaigns, and were more likely to appear in the Panama Papers. These findings reveal how dictatorships can influence young democracies using privatization reforms.

While credit supply growth is associated with exacerbating financial crises, its impact on long-run growth is unclear. Market access similarly has ambiguous economic effects over time. Using regional variation in bond payments to samurai and the introduction of railways in nineteenth century Japan, we find that together they are associated with persistent redistributive effects between regions and sectors. Areas with higher bond value and railway access experienced tertiary sector growth and primary sector shrinkage, with analogous results in sectoral labor shares. This interaction between credit supply and market access facilitated structural transformation but had little long-run net growth impact.

For many decades, there were stock exchanges operating in provincial cities across Britain. We analyze why companies listed on these markets and how this changed over time. We find that the provincial exchanges had traditionally been complementary to London, providing a trading venue for smaller regional companies. However, they gradually lost their uniqueness and were increasingly competing with London by listing similar stocks. Much of this change can be explained by shifts in industrial composition, leading to more companies being headquartered and listed in the capital and many of the remaining regional firms cross-listing in London to achieve certification.

We study labor earnings inequality during the Great Depression using establishment-level information from the Census of Manufactures (COM). Inequality, as measured by the interquartile range in earnings per worker, declines by 10 log points between 1929 and 1933. However, by 1935, this difference has recovered to its 1929 level. In a decomposition, this decline and then rise in inequality is entirely explained by returns to observable factors, most notably the skill premium and regional differentials. The exit of establishments plays an important role in the initial decline in inequality but barely any role in the recovery.