Men of finance raised funds for loans, asientos, to Philip II by trading short-term financial instruments in credit markets and by selling long-term annuities, juros. These activities are illustrated by an asiento with the Maluenda brothers (July 13, 1595), where short-term credit secured by the...

The Bank Restriction Act of 1797 suspended the convertibility of the Bank of England's notes into gold. The current historical consensus is that the suspension was a result of the state's need to finance the war, France's remonetization, a loss of confidence in the English country banks, and a...

This paper uses city-level data to examine the impact of a first wave of railroad construction in Sweden, between 1855 and 1870, from the 19th century until today. We estimate that railroads accounted for 50% of urban growth, 1855-1870. In cities with access to the railroad network, property...

The Napoleonic Wars had dramatic consequences for Spain's economy. The Peninsular War had higher demographic impact than any other military conflict, including civil wars, in the modern era. Farmers suffered confiscation of their crops and destruction of their main capital asset, livestock. The...

We add a historical and regional dimension to the debate on the Greek debt crisis. Analysing the 1841-1939 exchange-rate experience of Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia/Yugoslavia, we find surprising parallels to the present: repeated cycles of entry to and exit from gold, government debt...

New Economic Geography (NEG) models stress the importance of access to demand as a key driver of the spatial and temporal distribution of economic activity (Krugman, 1991). Therefore, in order to test the theoretical predictions emanating from NEG a sound measure of accessibility is required. In...

This study investigates the relation of pre-railroad transport infrastructure on Westphalian grain market integration in the early 19th century. It is motivated by recently found indications of macroeconomic change in Prussia such as increased demand for labour, disappearance of positive...

This paper calculates indicators of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) for 17 British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. The resulting indicators show that the late-Victorian 'workshop of the world' was at a marked...

Geography made rural society in the south-east of England unequal. Economies of scale in grain growing created a farmer elite and many landless labourers. In the pastoral north-west, in contrast, family farms dominated, with few hired labourers and modest income disparities. Engerman and...

In many countries, regional income inequality has followed an inverted U-shaped curve, growing during industrialisation and market integration and declining thereafter. By contrast, Sweden's regional inequality dropped from 1860 to 1980 and did not show this U-shaped pattern. Accordingly,...