Recent scholarship contends that ancient Mediterranean economies grew intensively. An explanation is that Smithian growth was spurred by reductions in transaction costs and increased trade flows. This paper argues that an ancient Greek institution, proxenia, was among the key innovations that allowed such growth in the period 500–0 BCE. Proxenia entailed a Greek city-state declaring a foreigner to be its “public friend,” a status that conferred both duties and privileges. The functions performed by “public friends” could facilitate economic transactions between communities. Accordingly, network and regression analyses establish a strong relationship between proxenia grants and trade intensity.

This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain from 1905–1945. We find that the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the reasons for this shift through a natural language processing method, which allows us to leverage expert opinion to track specific issues in our newspaper archives. We find a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues like socio-economic conflict. This holds even when exploiting content differences between the two newspapers in our corpus.

This paper estimates the migratory and fertility effects of the federal Relocation Program, which attempted to move Native American individuals to urban areas under the promises of financial assistance and job training. I find the Relocation Program increased the Native American population in the target cities by more than 100,000 people. I also find that second- and third-generation Native American women living in cities have a 50 percent lower fertility rate than those living in areas with historically large Native American populations. These findings indicate that this program meaningfully shifted the spatial distribution of the Native American population.

I analyze factory worker households in the early 1920s in Osaka to examine idiosyncratic income shocks and consumption. Using the household-level monthly panel dataset, I find that while households could not fully cope with idiosyncratic income shocks at that time, they mitigated fluctuations in indispensable consumption during economic hardship. In terms of risk-coping mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence that savings institutions helped mitigate vulnerabilities and that both using borrowing institutions and adjusting labor supply served as risk-coping strategies among households with less savings.

This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of the expansion of mass schooling and the long-term legacy of educational institutions. Based on a new provincial-level dataset for Italy in the period 1861–1911, we argue that different models of schooling provision adopted by the different pre-unification polities influenced primary-education organizations across macro-regions up to WWI. As a result, school access and the capability to generate literacy given current rates of enrollment differed substantially, with the Northern regions aiming to increase schooling for all, while the Center and the South implemented a more elitist model.

Due to a dearth of data, nineteenth century lending to sovereign borrowers was a blind date. We argue this is the reason for collateral pledges found in contemporary lending covenants, which enabled not execution, but the production of reliable fiscal data. Lawyers injected collateral clauses in sovereign debt covenants to permit credible disclosure of hard-to-access tax data. The study foregrounds the importance of big law firms as financial intermediaries and information producers. It also contributes a new view on the role played by contracts in sovereign debt.

The 1965 Immigration Act represented a radical shift in U.S. policy, which has been credited with dramatically expanding the volume and changing the composition of immigration. Its passing has often been described as the result of political machinations negotiated within Congress without regard to public opinion. We show that congressional voting was consistent with public opinion on abolishing the country-of-origin quotas but not with the desire to limit the volume of immigration. While the former initially reflected attitudes toward civil rights, the latter is consistent with contemporary expectations that the expansion in numbers would be modest.

This paper shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure that can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. We provide three methods for using this secondary variable to deal with non-classical measurement error in a binary treatment: set identification, bias reduction via sample restriction, and a parametric bias correction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by replicating four recent economic history papers. Relative to the initial analyses, our results yield markedly larger coefficient estimates.