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We derive monthly and quarterly series of UK GDP for the inter-war period from a set of monthly indicators that were constructed by The Economist at the time. The monthly information is complemented with data for quarterly industrial production, allowing us to employ mixed-frequency methods to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009307942
How did Britain sustain faster rates of economic growth than comparable European countries, such as France, during the Industrial Revolution? We argue that Britain possessed an important but underappreciated innovation advantage: British inventors worked in technologies that were more central...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015051728
This is Part 2 of a two-part paper which surveys the historical evidence on the role of institutions in economic growth. The paper provides a critical scrutiny of a number of stylized facts widely accepted in the growth literature. It shows that private-order institutions have not historically...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010371915
This is Part 1 of a two-part paper which surveys the historical evidence on the role of institutions in economic growth. The paper provides a critical scrutiny of a number of stylized facts widely accepted in the growth literature. It shows that private-order institutions have not historically...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010371916
Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010252126
What caused the recovery from the British Great Depression? A leading explanation - the "expectations channel" - suggests that a shift in expected inflation lowered real interest rates and stimulated consumption and investment. However, few studies have measured, or tested the economic...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012669620
This work shows the asymmetric effect of the reduction in transportation costs across different sectors in the process of the Great Divergence. Specifically, the analysis indicates that reductions in transportation costs of industrial goods enhance convergence of the growth rates of trading...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010347039
We investigate how protectionist policies influence economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was overturned by a protectionist majority in 1887. We employ the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012387616
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003497633
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003497703