Over the last century, the United States has witnessed three approaches to achieving better regulatory outcomes: the removal of “economic” regulations in certain sectors; regulatory impact analysis (RIA) of new “social” regulations; and retrospective analysis of existing regulations. This article reviews the rationale for each approach, the results to date, and the remaining challenges. It finds that both institutional and technical factors influence the success of reform efforts.

In 2023, Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking research in economics. In this article, I use Goldin’s research to reflect on the role of history of education in academic research. I argue that Goldin’s remarkable achievement underscores the need for historians of education to reach a wider disciplinary audience in the humanities and social sciences. Goldin’s success lies not in isolating her focus to a subfield, but in connecting historical research to wider concerns in the discipline of economics. Goldin’s research thus reminds us of the skills required of historians of education: to understand the research interest and terminology of other research fields, and to use historical methods to address the key problems that those research fields explore. That is, we need to learn how to apply historical methods to what are essentially nonhistorical problems.

This article begins by examining the historiography of Shanxi piaohao and asking how modernist financial discourse gradually took shape over the past century. It then counters the persistent modernist discourse and its anachronistic application to the history of piaohao and the north Chinese interior from two aspects. First, how piaohao managed to build an empire-wide financial network and facilitated flows of capital and goods during the nineteenth century. Second, how family-centered capitalist and non-capitalist histories countered piaohao's unrealized path to modern Western-style banking. This article challenges the perceived universalism of the Western European economy and adopts a Braudelian emphasis on an essential feature of the history of capitalism in a global context—that is, capitalism's unlimited flexibility and capacity for change and adaptation, as seen throughout the history of the Shanxi merchants and piaohao firms, not confined to the singular future of transformation into modern Western-style banks.

Even at long time horizons, modern outcomes are in some sense bounded by history. Culture shapes how people interact and as it propagates across generations, groups with more common ancestors face less frictions to cooperation. This, in turn, affects institutional and technological diffusion, implying a society's history plays a crucial role in the causes of sustained long-run economic growth. To test this, we follow other studies by proxying for historical effects with genetic relatedness, which yields a temporal proportionality of shared common ancestry. Measuring cultural traits are more challenging. We develop a new systematic measure through network analysis of Wikipedia. Connectivity statistics over the encyclopaedia's hyperlink-directed network captures unique features of cultural relatedness. Further, as we index pages, we can coarsen the network into specific topics. The results show how history correlates broadly over a range of cultural factors. Differences across the coarsened networks demonstrate not simply that history matters, but where it matters less.

Recent debates among historians and in public have concerned the links between German colonialism and imperialism before the First World War and the Nazi regime and its crimes. While a maximalist position on German colonial continuities is unsustainable, the possibility of important imperial legacies stretching into the Nazi period and the argument for a German colonial Sonderweg, or “special path,” are not logically coextensive. This article explores the transformation of Wilhelmine German liberal imperialism by focusing on commercial interests in Hamburg. It argues that empire's strongest legacy was its absence, an absence that created ambivalent possible futures and blurred the line between liberal and illiberal avenues to German power and international order. This blurriness offers an end-run around problematical attempts to narrate Nazism as little more than an extreme expression of global patterns and around untenable notions of German exceptionalism.

Adam Smith promoted free banking—private, competitive, convertible banknotes. He also supported restrictions on banks. We study Smith’s views and the era in which they developed, suggesting his ‘regulations’ were a backstop against banks’ risks to depositors but primarily monetary stability. In modern parlance, Smith supported macroprudential regulations to underpin monetary stability, as did Friedman and Schwartz the US FDIC. We discuss why Smith’s vision for banking went unrealised. Bank regulation became microprudential and ran aground in 2008/2009. The prominence of macroprudential regulation now provides a chance to reorientate regulation to support monetary stability. Early signs are not promising.

In this article we develop and analyse novel datasets to retrace the persistence and scale of underground market activity in Maoist China. We show that, contrary to received wisdom, Chinese citizens continued to engage in market-based transactions long after “socialist transformation” was ostensibly complete, and that this activity constituted a substantial proportion of local economic output throughout the Maoist era. This helps to explain, in part, why, when markets were officially reopened in China, private economic activity took off. We arrive at these findings through the development and analysis of novel datasets based on unconventional historical sources – namely, a collection of 2,690 cases of “speculation and profiteering” that were recovered from flea markets in eastern China. We show how these grassroots sources can be systematically analysed and used, in lieu of official statistical aggregates, to develop new insights into the macro workings of the Maoist economy.

This article studies the mechanics of sales taxes in the viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and western Venezuela) during the second half of the eighteenth century. Advocating a careful examination of the accounting, institutional, and fiscal practices of North Andean customs houses, it provides an extensive discussion on how tax records can be harnessed to study the scope and nature of Bourbon reforms and to measure trade flows. The article pursues three interrelated goals. First, it studies the impact of local negotiations and jurisdictional fragmentation on local rates and revenue collection, providing new insights into the concrete mechanisms of tax bargaining. Second, the study reinterprets data on the main North Andean entrepôts of trade to measure fiscal cycles, real tax pressure, and tax incidence. Proposing a new method for examining customs records, this research shows how fiscal concessions and economic cycles led to diminishing fiscal revenues. Finally, the research places the viceroyalty within the broader context of fiscal change in the Spanish Empire, arguing that the region collected fewer revenues not only because of its comparatively smaller economic activity but also because the combination of custom and reform yielded lower taxation rates and unique fiscal structures.