What is the long-term impact of pre-colonial ethnic institutions? I examine the consequences of the fragmentation of local indigenous communities produced by Spanish rule in Mexico. To do this I make use of unique data from 18th century pueblos — the basis of modern-day counties — to study...

We describe Peru's experience of chronic inflation through the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the need for inflationary taxation in a regime of fiscal dominance of monetary policy. Hyperinflation occurred when further debt accumulation became unavailable, and a populist administration engaged in...

Besides their ideas and social networks, émigré intellectuals bring with themselves practices for engagement with intellectual work. This article focuses on one such practice: the intellectual Kreis [circle]. It focuses on the Geistkreis, an interwar Viennese interdisciplinary intellectual...

This article offers a historical analysis of the contributions of U.S. interwar agricultural economics to the economics of information. Concerned with improving the circulation of information on agricultural markets, agricultural economists analyzed the relationship between agents’ information...

The Mongol conquest was one of the bloodiest wars in human history. The Mongol conquest of China (1205-1279 AD) continued to have persistent negative effects on long-term development, even centuries after the war. Using newly assembled war, population, and 16th century county-level agricultural...

From the 19th century to the 1940's, Quebec remained poorer and less economically developed than the rest of Canada in general and poorer than Ontario in particular. This placed Quebec at the bottom of North American rankings of living standards. One prominent hypothesis for the initiation of...

The Great Depression was the most devastating and destructive economic event to afflict the global economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. What, then, were the origins of the Great Depression and what have we learned about the appropriate policy responses to economic depressions...

In the aftermath of World War I, a financial war was fought on the battlegrounds of international organizations and financial diplomacy. While the League of Nations' Economic and Financial Organization tried to ensure the reconstruction of Europe through guaranteed loans and financial reforms,...

The explicit concepts of a central bank and monetary policy were not fully articulated until the 20th century, although, with some degree of circumspection, they can be used retrospectively in regard to earlier times. The oldest central banks were hardly central banks in the modern sense at...