We investigate the persistence of levels of self-employment and new business formation in different time periods and under different framework conditions. The analysis shows that high levels of regional self-employment and new business formation tend to be persistent for periods as long as 80...

Three monetary regimes - the gold standard, a regime of 'socialism in many countries' and the post-Bretton Woods regime - and difficult transitions between them have shaped the economic history of the twentieth century. The regimes consisted of coherent sets of government policies and equally...

Drawing on a recently-discovered correspondence archive of the 1840s, this article describes activities of the then most important land agency in Ireland, Messrs Stewart and Kincaid. Several of the firm’s clients resided in England. The partners supervised major agricultural improvements. They...

How markets perform during famines has long been a contentious issue. Recent research tends to associate famine with market segmentation and hoarding. The evidence of this paper, based on an analysis of the spatial and temporal patterns of price movements during four famines in preindustrial...

In this paper, we examine three famous episodes of deliberate deflation (or disinflation) in U.S. history, including episodes following the Civil War, World War I, and the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s. These episodes were associated with widely divergent effects on the real economy,...

How did the location of industry across interwar Poland react to the Polish reunification? After more than 120 years of political and economic separation, Poland was reunified at the end of 1918. In consequence, the removal of internal tariff barriers and improved infrastructure strengthened the...