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...

Business representatives and union leaders in highly industrialised countries often accuse the governments of less-developed countries of practising social dumping in the sense of deliberately neglecting work-place safety legislation, co-determination rights and other fringe benefits which...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

How does economic modernization affect group identity? Modernization theory emphasizes how labor migration led to the adoption of common identities. Yet economic development may reduce incentives to emigrate, preserving local cultures. We study England and Wales during the Second Industrial...

For those who think of Cleveland as a decaying rustbelt city, it may seem difficult to believe that this northern Ohio port was once a hotbed of high-tech startups, much like Silicon Valley today. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cleveland played a leading role in the...

Using a large, individual-level wage data set, we examine the impact of a major technological innovation the steam engine on skill demand and the wage structure in the merchant shipping industry. We find that the technical change created a new demand for skilled workers, the engineers, while...