We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular primary schooling. Our mediation analysis suggests that non-agricultural income, urbanization, and opportunities for skilled employment are important mechanisms, while agricultural income is not.

The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy’s postwar economic development. It exploits differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could modernize their infrastructure more quickly experienced higher increases in agricultural production, especially for perishable crops. In the same provinces, we observe larger investments in labor-saving machines, the entry of more firms into the industrial sector, and a larger expansion of the industrial and service workforces.

This paper examines the patterns of technology transfer from Britain to France during the early phases of industrializing using a dataset comprising all patents granted in France in the period 1791–1844. Exploiting the peculiarities of French legislation, we construct an array of patent quality indicators and investigate their determinants. We find that patents filed by British inventors or French inventors with personal connections to British inventors were of relatively higher quality. Overall, our results show that the French innovation system was capable of attracting and effectively absorbing key technologies from Britain.

In this article, I investigate the effect of landholding inequalities on the democratization process in nineteenth-century France. I focus on the 1849 election, which followed the establishment of the Second Republic (1848–1851), and on the first six elections of the Third Republic (1870–1940), which took place between 1876 and 1893. I find that stronger landholding inequalities were associated to a lower support for the Republicans, and therefore constituted a threat to the consolidation of democracy. I provide evidence that large landowners resisted the establishment of democracy by influencing the electoral behavior of economically dependent agricultural workers.

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where Black officeholders were attacked have the largest tax reversions. This provides the first quantitative evidence that Reconstruction political violence was specifically related to Black political efficacy.

Cross sections of coal prices in England for 1695, 1795, and 1842 are used to infer transportation rates by sea, river, canal, and road. The effectiveness of monopolies, the degree of market integration, and the patterns of regional supply of each mining district are then established. The growth rates of productivity in sea, river, and road transport from 1695–1842 are computed and combined with a social savings assessment of canals to measure the overall growth in the productivity of shipping coal. Productivity growth was substantial but had a surprisingly limited impact on the geography of production and consumption.

Secure property rights are usually considered to be essential for sustained economic development. In England, it is debated whether property rights have been secure since the medieval period or if they were only established after the Glorious Revolution. In this context, the paper examines the Court of Wards, which from 1540 to 1646 administered the Crown’s right to take custody of children and their lands when these were held by feudal-military tenures. The paper shows that wardship was a common occurrence, its exactions arbitrary but often heavy, and that it reduced the value of lands held by these tenures.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Dutch bankers channeled investors’ funds to sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean, Surinam in particular. Agency problems between plantation owners, bankers, and investors led to an arrangement called negotiaties. Bankers oversaw plantations’ cash flows and placed mortgage debt with investors. We demonstrate how this securitization arrangement worked using market-wide data and detailed records from banker F. W. Hudig. During the boom, debt contracts and their securitization were an effective solution for planters, bankers, and investors. However, the market crashed after an oversupply of credit. This led to inefficient restructuring due to debt overhang.

Economists have reported results based on populations for every country in the world for the past two thousand years. The source, McEvedy and Jones’ Atlas of World Population History, includes many estimates that are little more than guesses and that do not reflect research since 1978. McEvedy and Jones often infer population sizes from their view of a particular economy, making their estimates poor proxies for economic growth. Their rounding means their measurement error is not “classical.” Some economists augment that error by disaggregating regions in unfounded ways. Econometric results that rest on McEvedy and Jones are unreliable.

“… we haven’t just pulled the figures out of the sky. Well, not often.”

—McEvedy and Jones (1978, p. 11)

Does market access affect information technology by shaping its diffusion and adoption? The introduction of the telephone in Bavaria is used to demonstrate that local and external market access affected both. External connections shortened the diffusion time of exchanges by 3 percent on average, while 4 percent of lines were due to such inter-city communication links. However, relatively stronger local effects from population size and demand for communication services, especially in larger cities, imply that initially, the telephone was primarily a local urban amenity that also became an external communication link when it rolled out to more rural places over time.

This paper proposes a novel approach to assessing the efficiency and distributional consequences of occupational licensing statutes during the Gilded and Progressive eras, based on the practice of judicial review. At the time, state judges ruling on the constitutionality of police powers regulation operated under powerful legal norms that militated against redistribution and class legislation. Evidence presented in the paper strongly suggests that judges were significantly more likely to uphold, on constitutional grounds, occupational licensing legislation for occupations with important information asymmetries, suggesting that constitutional review promoted efficiency in occupational markets. These findings have implications for current policies regarding occupational licensing.