We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

This paper examines the impact of male casualties due to World War II on fertility and female employment in the United States. We rely on the number of casualties at the county-level and use a difference-in-differences strategy. While most counties in the U.S. experienced a Baby Boom following...

National life satisfaction is an important way to measure societal well-being and since 2011 has been used to judge the effectiveness of government policy across the world. However, there is a paucity of historical data making limiting long-run comparisons with other data. We construct a new...

Beginning in the late 1970s, China's economy delivered the largest growth spurt in recorded history. Striking discontinuity between recent outcomes and the economic experience of the prior 200 years invites portrayal of recent events as a "China miracle" that requires neither economic nor...

This paper addresses two main questions: (a) Has European integration hindered the implementation of labour, financial and product market structural reforms? (b) Do the effects of these reforms vary more across sectors than across countries? Using more granular reform measures, longer time...

Social scientists have long been interested in the effects of social-political upheavals on a society subsequently. A priori, we would expect that, when traumas are brought about by outsiders, within-group behaviour would become more collaborative, as society unites against the common foe....

France sent five thousand men to fight alongside George Washington's army in the American Revolutionary War. We show that the French combatants' exposure to the United States of America increased support for the French Revolution a decade later. French regions (départements) from which more...

Persecution, pogroms, and genocide have plagued humanity for centuries, costing millions of lives and haunting survivors. Economists and economic historians have recently made new contributions to the understanding of these phenomena. We provide a novel conceptual framework which highlights the...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...

This paper provides an overview of the complex conceptual and practical challenges that emerging market economies face as they attempt to reform their frameworks for financial regulation. These economies are striving to balance the quest for financial stability with the imperatives of financial...