During the first half of of the nineteenth century the United States emerged as a major producer of cotton textiles. This paper argues that the expansion of domestic textile production is best understood as a path- dependent process that was initiated by the proetction provided by the Embargo...

Why did the country that borrowed the most industrialize first? Earlier research has viewed the explosion of debt in 18th century Britain as either detrimental, or as neutral for economic growth. In this paper, we argue instead that Britain's borrowing boom was beneficial. The massive issuance...

There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description, represented by the views of Ashton and Landes, sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has...

This paper measures the degree of price discrimination across export destinations that is associated with exchange rate changes using U.S., U.K., German and Japanese industry-level data. Given the industries sampled more price discrimination across destinations is observed in the U.K., German...

Online data was collected for 350,000 products from over 65 fashion retailers in the U.S. and the U.K. Many retailers practice an extreme form of stickiness described as quantum prices: a large number of differentiated products are priced using few sparse prices, with price changes occurring...

We investigate the effects of private equity on product markets using price and sales data for an extensive number of consumer products. Following a buyout, target firms increase sales 50% more than matched control firms. Price increases—roughly 1% on existing products—do not drive this...

Using a unique dataset of daily U.S. and U.K. price listings and the associated number of clicks for precisely defined goods from a major shopping platform, we shed new light on how prices are set in online markets, which have a number of special properties such as low search costs, low costs of...

Between 1800 and 1860, the United States became the preeminent world supplier of cotton as output increased sixty-fold. Technological changes, including the introduction of improved cotton varieties, contributed significantly to this growth. Measured output per worker in the cotton sector rose...

We explore how changes in ownership and managerial control affect the productivity and profitability of producers. Using detailed operational, financial, and ownership data from the Japanese cotton spinning industry at the turn of the last century, we find a more nuanced picture than the...

This paper examines one of the central hypotheses of the New Institutional Economics: that the reform of institutions--the rules and regulations enforced by the State that both permit and bound the operation of markets--is crucial for the process of economic growth. It examines this hypothesis...