Based largely on industry-level aggregate statistics, the prevailing view, and one that has strongly influenced macroeconomic thought, is that real wages during the cycle containing the Great Depression are either acyclical or countercyclical. Does this finding hold-up when more micro data are...

We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term goal of restoring full potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the...

There is sparse evidence on the impact of health information on mental health as well as on the mechanisms governing this relationship. We estimate the causal impact of health information on mental health via the effect of a diabetes diagnosis on depression. We employ a fuzzy regression...

This paper provides estimates of labor productivity for one-third of UK manufacturing during the Great Depression. It covers engineering and allied industries, and metal working industries. A unique data set of actual hours of work is combined with comparable real output and employment...

This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...