This chapter surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms -Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and on the period up...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the labor-capital split in national income for 20 countries since the late 1800s. Our main identification strategy focuses on unique historical quasi-experimental events: i) the introduction of universal suffrage, ii) close election wins of left-wing...

The Axial Age, which lasted between 800 B. C. E. and 200 B. C. E., covers an era in which the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in various geographic areas, and all three major monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were born between 1200 B. C....

This paper documents industrial output and labor productivity growth around the poor periphery 1870-1975 (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia). Intensive and extensive industrial growth accelerated there over this critical century. The...

We focus on two international aspects of the Great Depression--financial crises and international trade-- and try to discern lessons for the current economic crisis. Both downturns featured global banking crises which were generated by boom-slump macroeconomic cycles. During both crises, world...

We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...

This paper documents industrial output and labor productivity growth around the poor periphery 1870-1940 (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia). Intensive and extensive industrial growth accelerated there over these seven critical...

We study linkages between financial development, international trade, and long-run growth using data since 1880 for seventeen now-developed "Atlantic" economies and a set of cross-country and dynamic panel data models. We find that finance and trade reinforced each other before 1930, but that...

This paper investigates the impact of the history of crises on macroeconomic performance. We first study the impact of past banking crises on the probability of a future banking crisis. Applying data for 1980‐2010 for all countries for which the required information is available, controlling...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...