Debate over trends in the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures, their causes and their impact has dominated the literature for more than a century. Classical economists claimed that the terms of trade of primary commodities should improve since land and natural resources...

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...

This paper documents industrial output growth around the poor periphery (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa) between 1870 and 2007. We find that although the roots of rapid peripheral industrialization stretch into the late 19th...

Between 1870 and 1913, economic convergence among present OECD members (or even a wider sample of countries) was dramatic, about as dramatic as it has been over the past century and a half. The convergence can be documented in GDP per worker-hour, GDP per capita and in real wages. What were the...

There have been two very different life cycles for great artists: some have made their greatest contributions very early in their careers, whereas others have produced their best work late in their lives. These two patterns have been associated with different working methods, as art's young...

Words have appeared in visual art since classical times, but until the modern era their use was generally restricted to a few specific functions. In the early twentieth century, the Cubists Braque and Picasso began using words in their paintings and collages in entirely new ways, and their...

This paper considers not only when in their careers the greatest artists of the twentieth century made their greatest discoveries, but also how quickly they made them. The results underscore the dominant position of Picasso and Cubism in twentieth-century art: Picasso alone accounts for the two...