Business, Economic and Financial History 2025-07-21

In this chapter, wie es eigentlich gewesen (ist) —as it actually happened— and zu den Sachen selbst —to the things themselves— resonate particularly through the engagement with the concepts of Verstehen — understanding— and Erklären —explaining—, two methodological poles in dynamic tension that continue to shape research in economic history in Western Europe, and arguably at the global level. Claude DIEBOLT Cliometrics, Economic history, Economics, History. 2025 By specifying the specie on which returns were to be repaid respondentia was a ubiquitous financial instrument to carry international trade in which silver was “essential” for its continuation. Where multiple currencies existed and silver was the preferred money, imported silver species performed as foreign currency. Thus, the import of foreign coins created issues for prices, profits and exchange rates. Eighteenth century Europeans alternatively used respondentia or bills depending on the monetary context, casting a shade of doubt on the inherent efficiency of a cashless means of payment. Until the 1820s, private bills of exchange did not circulate where cash had a premium. Europeans developed means to regulate the price of foreign coins and exchange rates. Elsewhere respondentia allowed to hedge against exchange risk and propitiated arbitrage profits, giving an advantage over bills. The article documents the global scope of the instrument; it explains the exchange nature of the contract and explores the issues that respondentia came to solve. It highlights the role of monies of account Europeans used in pricing foreign currencies in international trade. Irigoin, Alejandra private maritime trade finance; early modern global commerce; exchange risk; monies of account 2025-04-29 Cazes au Crédit lyonnais. De l'international à la direction générale (des années 1930 aux années 1960), éditions Droz, 2024, 134 p. Professeur émérite d'histoire économique de l'Université de Bordeaux IV, Hubert Bonin a écrit de nombreux ouvrages relatifs à l'histoire économique et plus particulièrement concernant les Banques. Cette biographie d'un dirigeant du Crédit lyonnais tombé dans l'oubli, permet de retracer de façon vivante tout à la fois l'itinéraire d'un pur produit de la « République des capacités » et l'ascension d'un homme qui a réalisé toute sa carrière au sein d'un même établissement, ce qui constituait sans doute la norme à cette époque. Fondé sur une exploitation très solide des riches archives du Crédit lyonnais, le livre d'Hubert Bonin permet également de mettre en lumière le dynamisme et la capacité d'adaptation, longtemps sous-estimés, dont a su faire preuve au cours des années qui vont de l'après-guerre à la fin des années soixante la première banque française de son temps. Né en 1903 à Pauillac en Gironde, Marcel Cazes est issu d'un milieu provincial relativement modeste. Brillant élève, il intègre l'école polytechnique et fait très vite le choix d'entreprendre une carrière dans la banque plutôt que dans les grands corps du service public. Entré au Crédit lyonnais en 1928, il rejoint rapidement la direction de la Haute banque qui était plus particulièrement active dans la gestion du bilan et de la trésorerie (« les mouvements de fonds ») mais aussi dans le suivi des grands comptes et des activités internationales. C'est d'ailleurs dans ce dernier domaine que Marcel Cazes a excellé. Après avoir exercé diverses responsabilités à l'étranger, d'abord au sein de la Banque franco portugaise, filiale du Crédit lyonnais, puis des succursales d'Anvers et de Luxembourg, il retrouve la direction de la Haute banque au sortir de la guerre. Il y est promu directeur des relations internationales dès 1953. C'est dans ce contexte que Marcel Cazes s'est imposé comme l'un des artisans principaux de la relance des activités internationales du Crédit lyonnais notamment en Amérique latine, au Moyen Orient et en Afrique. Au Brésil tout d'abord, il a présidé aux négociations qui ont conduit à la création en 1948 d'une nouvelle filiale, le Banco Francès e Brasiliero. Marc Jacob Crédit lyonnais, Marcel Cazes, Hubert Bonin 2024-12-30 This article analyses wealth inequality in the Republic of Venice during 1400–1800. The availability of a large database of homogeneous inequality measurements allows us to produce the most in-depth study of the factors affecting inequality at the local level available so far for any preindustrial society. Additionally, the occurrence of a major plague during 1629–30, an event that caused the death of 40% of the inhabitants of the area, allows us to contribute to the growing literature on the distributional consequences of epidemics. Across our dataset, of the three factors that recent literature has discussed as possibly able to explain overall inequality trends in the long run -- economic development, population and regressive taxation -- regressive taxation set by the central state had a relatively strong impact. We also find that locally, differences in inequality levels were determined by closeness to the capital city of Venice, altitude, and suitability of land to specific crops. Regarding the impact of the plague, we demonstrate that while the 1630 plague was different from the medieval Black Death as it did not lead to large-scale and enduring levelling, it did cause a structural break in the way in which some key variables affected inequality. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper) Alfani, Guido Di Tullio, Matteo Fochesato, Mattia 2025-06-16 I examine the impact of the Progressive-era Settlement movement on immigrant assimilation in the United States between 1880 and 1940. Settlements provided services such as job training and childcare to immigrants. Using an individual-level triple difference strategy based on cross-cohort and over-time variation in settlement exposure, I find that settlements increased labor force participation and income for men but not for women. These responses persisted into the generation exposed to settlements during childhood. The gendered effects stem from increased fertility and in-group marriage that excluded women from labor markets, particularly among immigrants from countries with more conservative gender norms. Davide M. Coluccia 2025 In the early 1940s, Japanese American farmers represented a highly skilled segment of the agricultural workforce in the Western United States, characterized by higher education levels and more specialized farming expertise than U.S.-born farmers. During World War II, around 110, 000 Japanese Americans (and 22, 000 agricultural workers among them) were forcibly relocated from an “exclusion zone” along the West Coast to internment camps. Most never returned to farming. Using county-level panel data from historical agricultural censuses and a triple-difference (DDD) estimation approach we find that, by 1960, counties in the exclusion zone experienced 12% lower cumulative growth in assessed farm value for each percentage point reduction of their 1940 share of Japanese farm workers, relative to counties outside the exclusion zone. These counties also lagged in farm revenues, adoption of high-value crops, mechanization, and adoption of commercial fertilizer. We present suggestive evidence of broader negative spillovers to local economic growth beyond the agricultural sector. Taken together, our findings highlight the long-run economic costs of this policy, illustrating how the loss of skilled farmers can reduce agricultural growth and, in a time of fast technological adoption, may have negative effects on the whole regional development. Peter Zhixian Lin Giovanni Peri 2025-06 This paper documents a new consequence of market integration: local reallocation, i.e., the exit of some workers from production even though employment increases in the same area and industry. Thanks to new data on over 150, 000 personal bankruptcies combined with detailed microcensus data from 19th-century Britain, we estimate the causal impact of railway access on employment growth and personal bankruptcies. Market integration increased both employment and bankruptcy probability solely in the manufacturing sector. Studying the mechanisms of local reallocation, we show that market integration increased the number and size of manufacturing firms that employed cheap, task-differentiated labour. Our results extend existing research focused primarily on reallocation either across sectors or across locations. Tobias Korn Jean Lacroix bankruptcies, market integration, reallocation, structural transformation 2025 This paper studies the finance-growth nexus in historical perspective. We employ a panel data model with interactive fixed effects and time-varying coefficients for a sample of advanced economies since the late 19th century. The model considers flexible specifications of heterogeneity and accounts for global common shocks that have likely shaped the finance-growth nexus over time. We present three main sets of results. First, our empirical analysis shows that the relationship between finance and growth is time-varying. Using our benchmark model, we estimate the time-varying slope coefficient of financial development and show that the finance-growth nexus has secularly evolved, thus challenging the mainstream assumption of a uniform association over time. Second, by accounting for global common shocks and their heterogeneous impact, we challenge the dominant narrative suggesting a consistently positive contemporaneous relationship between financial development and economic growth. Third, differences emerge when we distinguish between Schumpeterian finance (bank credit growth) and a more speculative type of finance (stock market growth). While both exhibit time-varying behaviors, the empirical evidence points to a substantially stronger and positive association between bank credit growth and economic growth, as opposed to stock markets, which tend to display a weaker or even negative relationship. Our results remain robust when we account for a range of alternative specifications and potential sources of variation. Krystian Bua Giovanni Dosi Maria Enrica Virgillito Finance-growth nexus, Financial development, Economic growth, Semiparametric methods, Time-varying estimates, Long-panel 2025-07-11 The Gründerkrise of the 1870s marks Germany’s first major experience with financial boom and bust. The assessment of its real impact has, however, been hampered by the non-availability of comprehensive and reliable national accounts data for the 19th century. This short paper seeks to overcome such difficulties by combining common factor analysis as proposed by Sarferaz and Uebele (2009) with financial filtering a la Borio et al. (2013) and Berger et al. (2015). The results confirm that the Gründerkrise was by far modern Germany’s worst peacetime economic crisis prior to the Great Depression in the late 1920s. Financial and monetary forces amplified the boom of 1871-73, deepened the downturn in 1874-79, and acted as a drag on the recovery until well into the 1880s. The pattern resembles modern ‘balance sheet recessions’, i.e., protracted economic weakness in the aftermath of financial crises. Mr. Johannes Wiegand Gründerboom; Gründerkrise; German economic history; financial crisis; balance sheet recession; factor analysis; financial filter 2025-07-04 The neoclassical economics of childbearing turns 65 this year, marking the anniversary of Gary Becker’s foundational article on the subject in 1960. This review article begins with a study of how childbearing has evolved in the United States over the last century, identifying distinctive features of the post-1960 era. Next, the article discusses standard neoclassical models of childbearing and shows how augmenting them with a supply side, which includes access to and information about contraception and abortion, increases their explanatory power. After reviewing recent quasi-experimental research testing this augmented model, the final part of the article reflects upon the implications of the recent transformation in US fertility rates for women and children and suggests fruitful avenues for future research. Martha J. Bailey 2025-06 Activists play a key role in the process of democratic transition and consolidation. How is their activism affected by democratic reforms? We study how local activism in England and Wales responded to the changes in representation introduced by the Great Reform Act of 1832. This reform reduced parliamentary representation in some areas and increased it in others. We exploit exogenous variation in which areas lost and gained representation and measure activism using the number of petitions each area sent to parliament. We find that petitioning increased in areas that gained representation, partly because of greater civil society mobilization, while petitioning fell in areas that lost representation. This shows that prodemocratic reforms can promote political activism, while anti-democratic reforms can decrease it. In the specific case of England and Wales, positive feedback between activism and reform helped make democratization a path-dependent process and the Great Reform Act its critical juncture. Aidt, T. S. Leon-Ablan, G. Activism, Petitions, Reform, Democratization, Democratic Backsliding, Representation, England, Great Reform Act 2025-06-26 Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1863 through 2024 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive noncore funding. These commonalities imply that bank failures are highly predictable using simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements. Failures with runs were common before deposit insurance, but these failures are strongly related to weak fundamentals, casting doubt on the importance of non-fundamental runs. Furthermore, low recovery rates on failed banks' assets suggest that most failed banks were fundamentally insolvent, barring strong assumptions about the value destruction of receiverships. Altogether, our evidence suggests that the primary cause of bank failures and banking crises is almost always and everywhere a deterioration of bank fundamentals. Sergio A. Correia Stephan Luck Emil Verner Bank failure; Banking History; banking fundamentals 2025-06-09 Early twentieth century efforts to overhaul the quality of medical education in the United States (principally between 1905 and 1915 – the “Flexner Report Era”) led to a steep decline in the number of medical schools and medical school graduates. In this paper, we examine the consequences of these medical school closures be- tween 1900 and 1930 for county-level physicians, nurses, and midwives per capita as well as for infant, non-infant, and total mortality. To do so, we construct a school closure intensity measure for all counties in the United States, combining variation in (i) distance from closures, (ii) the historical number of graduates from closing schools, and (iii) the timing of closures. Nearby medical school closures (within 300 miles) led to a 4% reduction in physicians per capita, even after physician market adjustment through physician migration and postponed retirement. Strikingly, we find that medical school closures led infant mortality rates to decline by 8% and non- infant mortality rates to decline by 4%, suggesting that reducing the supply of poorly trained physicians may have reduced mortality. Karen Clay Grant Miller Margarita Portnykh Ethan J. Schmick 2025-06 Lorsque l’on tape dans un moteur de recherche « Mortes pour la France 1914-1918 », plusieurs occurrences se réfèrent aux communes françaises détruites au début de la Grande guerre ; d’autres renvoient une maigre liste de noms. Si l’on se réfère aux chiffres officiels, elles seraient environ un millier. Cela nous semble bien peu. Si les femmes ont joué un rôle essentiel lors du premier conflit mondial, force est de constater que peu d’entre elles ont été récompensées pour service rendu à la nation. Il ne s’agit pas de remettre en cause le nombre d’hommes Morts pour la France au cours de la Grande Guerre ni de minimiser leur rôle, mais simplement de mettre un peu de lumière sur les femmes Mortes pour la France en 1914-1918. Partant de là, par la compilation de diverses sources, en tentant d’évaluer combien de femmes ont obtenu ou auraient dû obtenir la mention « Morte pour la France » lors de la Grande Guerre, ce travail répond à un double objectif quantitatif et qualitatif. Au-delà d’une simple élaboration de base de données, il constitue un travail de mémoire vis-à-vis des femmes au cours de la Grande Guerre en essayant de les sortir de l’ombre. Magali Jaoul-Grammare Valentin Reynaud Arnaud Vasquez-Perez Femmes, France, Mort pour la France, Première Guerre Mondiale. 2025 Are railways always a harbinger of prosperity? We examine the economic effects of railways in Bosnia-Herzegovina under Habsburg colonial rule. Our novel dataset consistently tracks the non-agrarian population share of over 4, 500 settlements in Habsburg Bosnia in 1885, 1895, and 1910, based on census records. Applying the inconsequential units approach, with least cost paths as our instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of railway access on structural transformation. Normal-gauge railways deindustrialized Bosnian settlements by exposing local crafts to imperial competition. Narrow-gauge railways accelerated structural transformation temporarily, primarily by attracting foreigners. Narrow-gauge railways had a more sustained impact on structural transformation in settlements endowed with human capital and secured by law enforcement. Our findings suggest colonial railways are no silver bullet for economic development; transport infrastructure requires development prerequisites to have a lasting positive effect. Magnus Neubert Stefan Nikolić railways, occupational structure, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Habsburg Empire 2025-07 Widowhood is a disruptive life event, and in ageing societies, increased numbers of individuals are potentially exposed to it. Yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of the demography of widowhood. Using total population data with information on marital and cohabiting unions, discrete-time event history analysis and incidence-based multistate lifetables, we analyse lifetime risk of widowhood, mean age at becoming widowed, widowhood expectancy, and variation in years spent widowed, and document gender and educational differences in these metrics over the last three decades in Finland. Our results show that, over time, individuals are less likely to experience widowhood, and when they do, it occurs at older ages. Women have higher widowhood risk, expectancy, and a lower mean age at widowhood than men. Widowhood expectancy for women declined from 8 to 6 years, while for men, it stagnated at around 2 years. Low-educated women faced more widowhood years than highly educated, while the opposite holds for men. By showing decreased risks, delayed onset, and shorter widowhood expectancy, particularly among women, our results suggest that the current older population may experience reduced exposure to the psychosocial and financial challenges of widowhood, with potentially reduced caregiving burden on families and the state. Moretti, Margherita Korhonen, Kaarina van Raalte, Alyson A Riffe, Tim Martikainen, Pekka 2025-07-04 We study how rising market integration shaped cooperative culture and behavior in the 1850–1920 United States. Leveraging plausibly exogenous changes in county-level market access driven by railroad expansion and population growth, we show that increased market access fostered universalism, tolerance, and generalized trust—traits supporting cooperation with strangers—and shifted cooperation away from kin-based ties toward more generalized forms. Individual-level analyses of migrants reveal rapid cultural adaptation after moving to more market-integrated places, especially among those exposed to commerce. These effects are unlikely to be explained by changes in population diversity, economic development, access to information, or legal institutions. Max Posch Itzchak Tzachi Raz markets, trade, cooperation, culture, universalism, tolerance, trust 2025-07-06 France is one of the countries where the phenomenon of fare-free public transport is most active, particularly in Europe. This public policy has given rise to controversy over its environmental, social and urban effects. This article offers a different way of discussing the phenomenon. It paints a picture of the phenomenon and then traces its origins back to the emergence of urban crises that began in the 1970s. Finally, it looks back at the major issues associated with this policy, showing that they reflect questions facing cities more widely today. Maxime Huré Arnaud Passalacqua Philippe Poinsot 2024 This paper analyzes 630, 000 paintings from 1400 onward to uncover how visual art reflects its socioeconomic context. We develop a learning algorithm to predict nine basic emotions conveyed in each painting and isolate a context effect—the emotional signal shared across artworks created in the same location and year—controlling for artist, genre, and epoch-specific influences. These emotion distributions encode subtle but meaningful information about the living standards, uncertainty, or inequality characterizing the context in which the artworks were produced. We propose this emotion-based measure, derived from historical artworks, as a novel lens to examine how societies experienced major socioeconomic transformations, including climate variability, trade dynamics, technological change, shifts in knowledge production, and political transitions. Clément Gorin Stephan Heblich Yanos Zylberberg 2025-06 A long-standing debate in Africa’s economic history is the speed with which the introduction of colonial currency changed the monetary systems in use on the continent. On the one hand, this introduction saw the gradual decline of indigenous currencies such as cowries and manilas. On the other, the persistence of such currencies suggests that a system of multiple currencies was maintained for some time after the beginning of colonial rule. This article uses new data on seasonal fluctuations in the circulation of official currencies in West Africa to argue that they were largely used for the purchase of cash crops and imports. Demand for these currencies was thus driven by their use as the medium of exchange in international trade. Such limited adoption of colonial currencies reflected both the motivations behind their introduction as well as Africans’ limited access to financial services. Gardner, Leigh A. colonialism; international trade; money; seasonality; West Africa 2025-06-30 Piero Sraffa, Pierangelo Garegnani, and Luigi Pasinetti undermined the analytical foundations of marginalist price and distribution theories and recovered the surplus approach proper to classical economists. This paper studies the comparative usefulness of, respectively, the marginalist and the modern surplus approaches for the interpretation of pre-capitalistic economies and for the theory of institutions, also in the light of Polanyi’s contribution. With this in mind, the paper examines some recent mainstream contributions concerning the origin of inequality and related institutions. Challenging, they adopt materialist explanations of the origin of inequality and institutions drawn from archaeological studies. On the critical side, these studies reject with poor arguments the classical surplus approach. Moreover, they employ marginalist concepts, in particular the relative scarcity of production factors, to explain the onset of inequality. Those concepts are of a spurious nature, especially once applied to ancient economies. In this respect, the paper refers both to Marx’s and Polanyi’s emphasis on the role of ‘embedded’ rather than market relations in ancient societies, and to Sraffa’s criticism of ‘marginism’ (scarce historical realism) to the marginalist curves related to production (Rosselli and Trabucchi 2019). Sergio Cesaratto Origins of inequality, Surplus approach, Marginalism, Samuel Bowles, Sraffa’s Marginism Jel Classification: A12, B51, B52, N01, Z13 2025-07 We exploit a historical experiment that occurred in Czechoslovakia after World War Two to study the drivers of social capital accumulation in an extremely unfavorable environment. Between 1945 and 1948, the Sudetenland became the scene of ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of nearly three million German speakers and the simultaneous influx of nearly two million resettlers. Focusing on the areas where at least 90% of the population was forced to leave, we show that the municipalities hosting a church built before 1945 developed significantly higher social capital under the communist rule, which persisted after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The heterogeneity of effects reveals that the longer a resident pastor served in a parish, the more civic capital emerged in the municipality after the Velvet Revolution, suggesting that the social interactions facilitated by pastors were crucial in establishing the foundational layer for social capital in church-hosting communities. Mikula, Stepan Reggiani, Tommaso G. Sabatini, Fabio social capital, forced migration, conflict, institutions, religion, transition countries 2025-07 This paper reflects on the impact of the Great British Class Survey, hosted by the BBC from 2011 to 2013. I argue that its intense appeal lay in the ability to crystallize three separate trends in one piece of research. These are (i) the problems of relying on a single variable definition of class, such as one based on employment and occupation; (ii) the growing significance of wealth and property as a central driver of 21st century class relations; and (iii) the inherent intersectionality of class with multiple other divides, notably around race and gender. The Great British Class Survey both undercut occupationally based models of class analysis that had become hegemonic during the late 20th century, and offered a template for a new multidimensional approach to class analysis. I consider how these multidimensional perspectives on class are being strengthened through the important shift towards centering wealth and property as the 21st century bedrock of class relations. Savage, Mike class; Great British Class Survey; wealth; multidimensional inequality 2025-06-01 I jointly estimate monthly series for GDP and eight subcomponents for the US since 1950. The series match 1) quarterly national accounts equivalents, 2) exact data on monthly consumption, and 3) past relationships with other monthly indicators. I estimate the Kalman filter parameters by GMM, allowing fast calculation of confidence intervals for monthly estimates including parameter uncertainty, and validate the confidence intervals. After 1970 standard errors are tight, less than 0.3pp of GDP, and point estimates informative, with standard deviations four times the standard error. I provide confidence intervals for recessions and show that output peaks line up well with the onset of NBER recessions, but troughs often predate NBER equivalents. Mr. Philip Barrett Kalman Filter; GDP; recession; GMM 2025-07-04