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...

We derive monthly and quarterly series of UK GDP for the inter-war period from a set of monthly indicators that were constructed by The Economist at the time. The monthly information is complemented with data for quarterly industrial production, allowing us to employ mixed-frequency methods to...

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...

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 link between the diffusion of electricity and the increase in labour productivity growth in the manufacturing sector during the inter-war period. A comparative analysis of the USA, Britain, Germany, and Japan shows that the trend acceleration in labour productivity is...

This paper uses semiparametric time-series methods to model the effects of weather variations on the output growth rate of the construction sector. The paper also employs structural time-series methods to model the cyclical paths of weather variables and uses this information to evaluate the...

This paper uses semiparametric and parametric time-series methods to model the non-linear agro-climatic output relationship for the British economy during the period 1867-1913.

This paper uses semiparametric time-series methods to model the non-linear effects of weather variations on the output growth rate of the construction sector. The study is undertaken at both the annual and quarterly frequencies; the results show that weather shocks have significant effects on...