[...]The loss of manufacturing jobs has created a widespreadsense that manufacturing in New York City has nofuture, that the decline is unstoppable and “largely inevitableand foreordained” (Fitch 1993, p. 107). Even theoptimistic report of the Commission on the Year 2000,New York Ascendant,...

After liberalizing international transactions of financial assets, many countries experiencelarge swings in asset prices, capital flows, and aggregate production. This paper studies howthe adjustment to capital account liberalization depends upon the degree of development of adomestic financial...

When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...

Recent research on international productivity comparisons has focused on the discrepancies between benchmark comparisons and time series extrapolations from other benchmarks. For a 1907 benchmark, Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop (2007) find German manufacturing to be only slightly ahead of...

This paper investigates the role of consumption in the emergence of the motion picture industry in Britain France and the US. A time-lag of at least twelve years between the invention of cinema and the film industry’s take-off suggests that the latter was not mainly technology-driven. In all...

A founding member of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, of the journal Past and Present, and of a distinctive and distinguished School of History at the University of Birmingham, Rodney Hilton was among the most notable medieval historians of the latter half of the twentieth...

New data on individual worker’s outputs show that New England ring spinners exhibited substantial on the job learning c. 1905. Despite this, variable capital-labour ratios meant high labour turnover reduced aggregate labour productivity only fractionally. The combination of variable...

Although industrial production and growth in Greece during the interwar periodhas attracted considerable attention, there has not been any serious challengeeither in qualitative or quantitative terms to the orthodoxy established in theperiod itself. The literature usually sees the 1920s as a...

By the late 19th century, the export of natural ice from Norway to Britain was a major trade, fuelled by the growing British consumption of ice. Although new technology eventually allowed the production of artificial ice, natural ice retained a strong market position until World War I. This...

“Migrations have been part of human history since the dawn of time”. Yet, in the wake of long-term economic transformations over the past five hundred years, human migration and mobility have assumed a dimension which has proved new both in scale and in character. The gradual transformation...