This paper revises the traditional view of Spain as a predatorycolonial state that extracted revenue from natural resources andpopulations in the Americas while offering little in return. Using 18thcentury Spanish American treasury accounts we show that localelites not only exerted important...

This paper explores the connections between independence from Spain and Portugal and economic backwardness in Latin America. The release of the fiscal burden was offset by higher costs of self-government, while opening up to the international economy represented a handmaiden of growth....

The nineteenth century saw the advent of news agencies that became well-coordinated global organisations with large networks of correspondents, such as Reuters, Havas, Wolff-Continental and Associated Press. Essential features of these agencies were substantial fixed and sunk set-up costs, high...

[...]We observe several trends in payment timing from 1998 to2006. After 2000, the peak in payment activity shifts to laterin the day. Indeed, post-2000, a greater concentration ofpayments occurs after 17:00. At the same time, however, severalfactors have been associated with increased payment...

[...]This article evaluates the short-term economic consequencesof the attack on Manhattan and the four other boroughsthat make up New York City. We begin with the deepest loss—that of human lives. We then look at the effects of the attack onthe inputs to the production process: labor and...

This paper revisits Bairoch’s hypothesis that in the late 19th century tariffs were positively associated with growth, as recently confirmed by a new generation of quantitative studies (see O`Rourke (2000), Jacks (2006) and Clemens-Williamson (2002, 2004)). This paper highlights the importance...

This paper presents new regional GDP estimates for the Habsburg Monarchy and constructs measures of market potential for its 22 major regions. The paper argues that regional income differentials were significantly larger, that intra-empire catching-up of poor with rich regions was far more...

At the start of the long wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the taxes available to the British state fell mainly on outlays made by its citizens, upon domestically produced commodities and services. Smaller proportions came from import duties and direct taxes upon their incomes...

Much of the literature on economic change in the post-1945 world is permeated by two ideas: the temporal convergence of per capita incomes across economies and the spatial advance of free trade. For many economists and historians the two are linked: the reduction of trade barriers in the...

Economic convergence has emerged as one of the key debates in the theoretical andhistorical literature over the last decade. Galor identified three forms of long run percapita income convergence: absolute convergence, whereby convergence occursindependently of the initial conditions facing each...