We analyze social mobility of decennial citizenry cohorts of Zurich born between 1780 and 1870. We categorize individuals according to their occupations and use different measures to show the level, change, and components of intergenerational mobility. Mobility was imperfect and weakly...

We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This...

The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,' by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998) article 'The Impact of Group-Based Credit on Poor...

This study presents a new database, the Swedish National Wealth Database (SNWD), which contains annual data on private, public and national wealth and sectoral saving rates in Sweden over the past two centuries. The paper reviews previous investigations of national wealth, compares their...

This paper has two objectives. The first is to study the revenue from the gift, inheritance, and estate taxes in Sweden during more than a century. The second is to focus on a unique episode during the second half of the 1940s when gifts and gift tax revenue exploded. This episode has never...

This paper studies the level and the causes of earnings inequality in late nineteenth century America and Britain using microdata from the United States Commissioner of Labor Survey in 1890 and 1891. We examine whether lessons from studies on changes in earnings inequality over time -- the...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

This paper explores a variety of potential issues one has to address when estimating intergenerational mobility with historical data. Many studies are potentially affected by bias originating from individuals emigrating and thus dropping out of the sample, missing information on the life-cycle,...

This research explores the effect of industrialization on the process of development. In contrast to conventional wisdom that views industrial development as a catalyst for economic growth, the study establishes that while the adoption of industrial technology was conducive to economic...