Is free trade good for growth? Some of the most disturbing evidence to the contrary comes from a period that is often described as the first era of globalization. Studies of the period 1870-1914 have emphasised that protectionist tariff policy was associated with higher rates of economic growth....

This paper evaluates the diffusion of electricity within the context of a GPT perspective. The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to evaluate the hypotheses of a...

This paper argues that non-random measurement errors in the estimates of British Gross Domestic Product makes the compromise estimate a biased indicator of medium-term economic growth. Since the compromise estimate of GDP has been widely accepted and used to describe macroeconomic trends in the...

We derive monthly and quarterly series of UK GDP for the inter-war period from a set of indicators that were constructed at the time. We proceed to illustrate how the new data can contribute to our understanding of the economic history of the UK in the 1930s and have also used the series to draw...

This paper compares the effects of weather shocks on agricultural production in Britain, France and Germany during the late nineteenth century. Using semi- parametric models to estimate the non-linear agro-weather relationship, we find that weather shocks explain between one and two-thirds of...