This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

This paper reconstructs Revealed Comparative Advantages (RCA) and Economic Complexity Indices (ECI) for a large number of countries in the second half of the 19th century, by using data from the catalogues of five universal exhibitions held in Paris in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900. This...

This paper contributes to the debate on the origins of modern economic growth in Europe from a very long-run perspective using econometric techniques that allow for a long-range dependence approach. Different regimes, defined by endogenously estimated structural shocks, coincided with episodes...

This paper explores the pattern of agricultural productivity across 19th century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the 'Little Divergence' between European regions. We argue that access to urban demand was the dominant factor explaining the gradient of agricultural productivity as...

This paper attempts to clarify how the European economic crisis from 2007 onwards can be understood from the perspective of a Marxian monetary theory of value that emphasizes in-trinsic, structural flaws regarding capitalist reproduction. Chapter two provides an empirical description of the...

Intersectoral linkages can act as shock propagation channels and shape the pattern of structural transformation. To our knowledge, no research has examined how subnational differences in intersectoral linkages impact such spillover effects. We hypothesize that regional differences in local...

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between international trade and economic growth in an unbalanced panel of 20 European countries in a long-term perspective, since the mid-19th century to present days, differentiating between the periods before and after the start of the Second World...

This paper examines the nonlinear propagation of sectoral productivity shocks in a general equilibrium framework with intersectoral linkages characterized by allowing elasticities of substitution in sectoral outputs and sectoral productivities to vary across sector pairs. Evidence based on a...

This article reviews the proximate factors of human welfare since 1870 by discussing two strands of the economic history literature and identifying various key areas for further research. The first strand focuses on level accounting studies that attribute between-country economic inequality to...

The authors revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...