Economic studies typically underestimate incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations that enhance allocative efficiency and structural dynamics. This paper assesses over 12,000 innovations by female patentees and participants in industrial fairs and prize-granting institutions...

How might COVID-19 affect human capital and wellbeing in the long run? The COVID-19 pandemic has already imposed a heavy human cost--taken together, this public health crisis and its attendant economic downturn appear poised to dwarf the scope, scale, and disruptiveness of most modern pandemics....

The current historical consensus on the economic causes of the inexorable Nazi electoral success between 1930 and 1933 suggests this was largely related to the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression (high unemployment and financial instability). However, these factors cannot fully account...

This article develops a method for quantitatively tracking the agenda of the British Parliament--by which I mean the substantive topics on which Parliamentary debate was focused--from 1810-2005 using descriptions of 1.7 million Parliamentary debates from the Parliamentary Hansard. This provides...

The historical fertility transition is one of the most important events in economic history. This study provides new evidence on the role that ideas about family planning played in this transition. We begin by documenting a link between the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial that took place in...

Modern metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of economic activity and the transport of millions of people each day between their residence and workplace. We use the revolution in transport technology from the invention of steam railways, newly-constructed spatially-disaggregated data...

Although it has been well established that financial volatility is related to news and macroeconomic shocks, there has been less emphasis on the importance of underlying economic and political stability. In this paper we study the behavior of consol returns since 1729 and identify a...

This paper presents a synopsis of recent NBER studies of the history of corporate governance in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together, the studies underscore the importance of path dependence, often as...

This paper develops an analytical framework for studying colonial investment from the perspective of neoclassical political economy. The distinguishing feature of colonial investment in this model is that the metropolitan government restricts the amount of investment in the colony in order to...

The impact of fiscal policy on economic activity is still a matter of great debate. And, ever since Keynes first commented on it, interwar Britain, 1918- 1939, has remained a particularly contentious case | not least because of its high debt environment and turbulent business cycle. This debate...