This article scrutinizes the recently postulated link between the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and economic success. Multivariate analysis of 4,705 demographic observations, covering women's marriage age, female lifetime celibacy, and household complexity in 39 European countries, shows that the most extreme manifestations of the EMP were associated with economic stagnation rather than growth. There is no evidence that the EMP improved economic performance by empowering women, increasing human capital investment, adjusting population to economic trends, or sustaining beneficial cultural norms. European economic success was not caused by the EMP and its sources must therefore be sought in other factors.

The partition of German Togoland after World War I provides a natural experiment to test the impact of British and French colonization. Using data of recruits to the Ghanaian colonial army 1908–1955, we find that literacy and religious affiliation diverge at the border between the parts of Togoland under British and French control as early as in the 1920s. We partly attribute this to policies towards missionary schools. The divergence is only visible in the South where educational and evangelization efforts were strong. Contemporary survey data show that border effects that began in colonial times still persist today.

We study the initial expansion of public schooling across Brazilian states (1889–1930) and develop an alternative explanation of how colonial institutions may affect the provision of public goods in the long run. We find that states that exported commodities undergoing international booms, between 1889 and 1930, had significantly larger export tax revenues and could spend more on education, while other states lagged behind. Yet, such positive effect of commodity booms on education expenditures was muted in states that either had more slaves before abolition or cultivated cotton during colonial times.

Careful handling of an eclectic data set reveals how unequal were the incomes of different classes of Russians on the eve of Revolution. We estimate incomes by economic and social class in each of the fifty provinces of European Russia. On the eve of military defeat and the 1905 Revolution, Russian income inequality was middling by the standards of that era, and less severe than is inequality today in China, the United States, and Russia itself. We note how the interplay of some distinctive fiscal and relative-price features of Imperial Russia might have shaped the now-revealed level of inequality.

Measurement of the value of “media capture” (the control of newspapers by business or political interests) is difficult. However, if capture is valuable, it should affect the price of newspaper shares. Useful information about the value of media capture should be retrievable from Stock Exchange data. Interwar France provides a unique setting to implement this idea because key newspapers floated voting and nonvoting stocks. Combined with takeover prices, data yield estimates of the price of media capture and of the time-series evolution of this price. Comparison with Britain sheds new light on a dark episode of French history.

We use plant-level data from the Census of Manufactures to study collusion in the United States macaroni industry during the Great Depression. The National Industrial Recovery Act was passed in 1933 to promote recovery through industry coordination of economic activity. While there is no change in the price-cost margin after the law is passed, a variety of markers of anti-competitive conduct suggest that collusion indeed increased. Prices became less responsive to changes in cost, the dispersion of prices decreased, and the persistence in prices increased.

Railroads in late nineteenth-century Japan are credited with facilitating factor mobility as well as access to human and financial capital, but their impact on firms has been unclear. Using a prefecture-level panel data set and a difference-in-differences model that exploits the temporal and spatial variation of railroad expansion, I investigate the relationship between railways and increased firm activity. Rail access led to higher average firm capitalization, particularly in manufacturing, and more populated and less accessible areas gained disproportionately more firms. By widening markets and allowing for agglomeration economies, Japanese railways promoted capital investment and more efficient resource allocation.

By analyzing a newly compiled data set of interest rates on public annuities in early modern Italy, this article finds that the cost of borrowing fell in spite of growing debts and stagnating fiscal revenues. Feudalism and clerical interference increased the cost of borrowing, while parliaments, wars, and centralized fiscal institutions mattered little. The constitutional representation of creditors may have meant significant markups for republican oligarchs. These results cast doubts on the claim that the growth of absolutism was at the root of Italy's economic decline.