Reform of the welfare state is at the centre of political debate. In a new book, CASEmembers analyse changes in social policies over the last twenty-five years, trends inspending, outcomes of policies, and impacts on institutions and families.The stereotypes of both left and right are wrong....

The size and strength of the Royal Navy experienced a punctuated evolution into the largest and most powerful Navy in the world by 1815.Most historians tend to represent its superiority in conflicts at sea as an indication of several factors that would be conceptualized by economists as...

This paper examines patterns of structural change and labour productivity growth in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. Using shift-share analysis and a set of basic measures to account for the contribution of physical and human capital growth, it seeks to address three questions:...

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...

We revisitWestern Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence and tentativelyextrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. Thepoorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through bothhigher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

[...]In this article, we shed light on the globalizationof international production and trade by demonstratingthe increasingly important role vertical specializationplays in international trade. We use case studies andinput-output tables to calculate the level and growth...

We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the post-war shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than...

This paper presents new regional GDP estimates for the Habsburg Monarchy and constructs measures of market potential for its 22 major regions. The paper argues that regional income differentials were significantly larger, that intra-empire catching-up of poor with rich regions was far more...

Research into the origins of economic growth in the late nineteenth century Habsburg Empire has so far suffered from a lack of evidence on the evolution of the capital stock. As a first step towards a more comprehensive documentation of the role played by factor inputs in the Habsburg growth...