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...

The world has seen two globalization booms over the past two centuries, and one bust. The first global century ended with World War I and the second started at the end of World War II, while the years in between were ones of anti-global backlash. This lecture reports what we know about the...

Most labor scarce overseas countries moved decisively to restrict their immigration during the first third of the 20th century. This autarchic retreat from unrestricted and even publicly-subsidized immigration in the first global century before World War I to the quotas and bans introduced...

Within-country ethnic diversity in high-wage immigrant nations is driven by long distance migration. This paper documents the migration-diversity connection for the first global century before 1914 and the second global century after 1950. It distinguishes between ethnic diversity among the...