American economic historians generally believe that U.S. modern economic growth began before 1840, was broadly based, and the acceleration was gradual. These claims are treated as conjectures rather than solid conclusions because the census did not publish good economic data before 1840. But the earlier period was not a “statistical dark age,” as sometimes asserted. After 1817, systematic statistics on postal activity were available at the local level at high frequencies. These data shed light on the timing and sources of the onset of modern economic growth, the patterns of regional development, and the spread of a culture of communication.

This paper uses a novel georeferenced cross-sectional dataset to explore which factors influenced the funding of hospitals and dispensaries in colonial India, emphasizing land tenure systems as a cause of regional variation. Where land was owned by cultivators, healthcare facilities received more resources from local public bodies and were better funded compared to regions where land was owned by landlords. In contrast, in landlord regions they received more private donations and subscriptions from Indians.

When did marriage become strongly assortative? I use a uniquely suitable database from Quebec 1800–1970 to provide the long-run perspective necessary to answer this question. First, I develop a novel method that reveals that marriage was highly assortative as far back as the early nineteenth century. Next, I show this matching depends on the individual human capital of women, not just on family backgrounds. Finally, I show that mothers had an effect on child outcomes independent of the fathers. Thus, despite deeply conservative gender norms, marriage matching—and women—have always mattered for social mobility.

Using linked Census Tree records and archival sources, I explore the roles of race and gender in migrant selection and sorting during the exodus of single young women and men from U.S. Southern farms from 1900–1940. Female migration rates, influenced by changes in farm men’s marriageability, rose during the farm crisis of 1920–1940 and exceeded men’s by 1940. On- and off-farm discrimination by race and gender drove differences in migrant characteristics: out-of-South Black female migrants, but not within-South, were positively selected on education and family resources, while White women were positively selected across both destinations.

This paper is a part of the project supported by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 call (project ID is 101027432). We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the participants of the sessions organized at the World Economic History Congress in Paris, CLIO World Conference in Dublin, and the European Historical Economics Society meeting in Groningen, WEast 2023 Conference in Prague, as well as the participants of the seminar series in Utrecht, Groningen, Abu Dhabi (NYU), London (LSE), Odense (SDU), and Berlin (Humboldt), the participants of internal seminars at the University of Southern Denmark and the University of Bologna. We are especially thankful to the participants of the 2023 Summer Workshop in the Economic History and Historical Political Economy of Eurasia (Paris). We especially appreciate the help of Dmitrii Khitrov with map design. We also acknowledge substantive comments by Jutta Bolt, Jonathan Chapman, Herman de Jong, Steven Hoch, Andrei Markevich, Steven Nafziger, Paul Sharp, Alessandro Stanziani, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.

With 70 million dead, World War II remains the most devastating conflict in history. Among the survivors, millions were displaced, returned maimed from the battlefield, or endured years of captivity. We examine the effects of such war exposures on labor market careers, showing that they often become apparent only at certain life stages. While war injuries reduced employment in old age, former prisoners of war prolonged their time in the workforce before retiring. Many displaced workers, especially women, never returned to employment. These responses align with standard life-cycle theory and thus likely hold relevance for other conflicts.

Does the location of a state relative to others matter? We argue that a state’s location can affect its bargaining power, and thus multilateral relations if trade costs depend on trade routes that pass through other states. This is an important, yet neglected aspect of economic history. We show how an exogenous border change—caused by Britain’s intervention at Vienna in 1815—affected the location and trade routes of Prussia and other German states. We find that this border change led to the formation of the first customs union in history, the German Zollverein of 1834.

To what extent do strike threats prompt firms to adopt capital-intensive methods to deter strikes or labor-intensive strategies to maintain flexibility during work stoppages? We introduce a theoretical model that demonstrates how threats of industrial action influence capital investments through relative factor prices and the power dynamics between workers and employers. Using newly digitized data from 3,141 industrial conflicts and collective agreements in Norway during the interwar period, our findings indicate that strikes generally drive firms toward less capital-intensive technologies. This trend is particularly pronounced in conflicts resolved at the branch or national level, where strike threats may appear more exogenous to firms.

We study how changes in a country’s administrative hierarchy affect development at the city level. We exploit the 1806 Napoleonic administrative reform implemented in the Kingdom of Naples as a historical experiment to assess whether district capitals endowed with supra-municipal administrative functions gained an urban development premium compared with non-capital cities. We find that district capitals recorded a population growth premium throughout the nineteenth century (1828–1911) and experienced higher industrialization both before and after the Italian unification (1861) compared with non-capital cities. We explain our results through mechanisms related to public goods provision and transport network accessibility.

Using a new database of European academics, we build a network of universities that is based on professors’ mobility. We describe how the network was altered following the Protestant Reformation. We focus on fragmentation and on universities’ centrality. Dyadic regressions confirm that geography and vernacular languages were important for mobility, but did not substitute for religion. We compare simulated networks with and without religious identity. Most universities lose centrality in the simulated religious network compared to the non-religious one. As publications per university are correlated with centrality, the loss of connectedness of many universities after the Reformation contributed to their scientific decline.

Between 1910 and 1940, U.S. high school graduation rates rose five-fold, driving twentieth-century economic growth. I explore how the Great Depression’s surge in youth unemployment influenced this trend, emphasizing gender and socioeconomic disparities. Using linked census data and newly digitized city-level unemployment rates, I find that youth unemployment significantly increased high school and post-secondary completion among higher-income boys, while effects on girls and lower-income youths were negligible. These results underscore the role of household resources in leveraging educational opportunities, as financial constraints limited disadvantaged groups from benefiting from reduced opportunity costs.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Public Works Administration loaned 50 U.S. railroads over $1.1 billion between 1932 and 1939. The government’s goal was to increase employment and decrease the likelihood of bond defaults. Bailouts appear to have had little effect on employment, but we estimate that they did increase the average wage of railroad employees. Bailouts are estimated to have reduced firm debt, but did not significantly impact bond default. We find some evidence that manufacturing firms located close to railroads benefited from bailout spillovers.

We provide empirical evidence that central banks can mitigate economic crises more efficiently when they extend eligibility for their discount facility to any safe asset or solvent agent. Nineteenth-century France serves as a case study to circumvent endogeneity. Following 1863, an agricultural pandemic increased defaults outside agriculture. We exploit specificities of the discount window to create exogenous variation in central bank access. Regressions show that while the demand shock brought about by the pandemic led to an increase in defaults outside agriculture by 20 percent, this effect was significantly reduced whenever a branch office of the central bank was present.

This paper investigates the causal effects of sovereign debt crises in a sample of 50 defaulting economies between 1870 and 2010. As default is potentially endogenous, we use the narrative approach to identify plausibly exogenous episodes. We find economically and statistically significant costs of up to 3.2 percent of GDP before recovering to the pre-crisis level after five years. The average aftermath, however, conceals a large heterogeneity by default cause. Defaults originating from negative supply shocks, political crises, or adverse terms of trade are associated with higher costs. Demand shocks, in contrast, have a moderate effect that is quickly reversed.

This paper evaluates how a major policy shift—the suspension of the gold standard in September 1931—affected employment outcomes in interwar Britain. We use a new high-frequency industry-level dataset and difference-in-differences techniques to isolate the impact of devaluation on exporters. At the micro level, the break from gold reduced the unemployment rate by 2.7 percentage points for export-intensive industries relative to non-export industries. At the aggregate level, this effect stimulated the labor market, the fiscal outlook, and economic growth. Devaluation was therefore an important initial spark of recovery from the depths of the Great Depression.