We develop a parsimonious finance and endogenous growth model with microeconomic frictions in entrepreneurship and a role for credit constraints. We demonstrate that though an efficiency-growth relation will always exist, the efficiency-depth-growth relation may not. This has implications for...

In this article, I use documents obtained from the NatWest Group archives to examine the work of Alexander Shand as a director of Parr's Bank during the period 1909-1918. A Scottish banker, Alexander Shand was recruited by the Japanese government early in his career to instruct Japanese...

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a...

In 1836, Société Générale created the world's first closed-end equity fund, Mutualité Industrielle. It promised to be a diversification tool targeted towards less-wealthy investors. We confirm that the trust's returns were indeed better than returns on synthetic portfolios such investors...

This paper evaluates the effect on crime of creating a fundamental modern-day institution: centralized professional police forces tasked with preventing crime. We study the 1829 formation of the London Metropolitan Police - the first professional force worldwide. Using newly digitized and...

There is a large and growing literature on the relationship between financial development and economic growth. It suggests a positive causal link running from finance to growth. We consider, in broad terms, the existing historical evidence on this connection. We demonstrate that constraints on...

This paper investigates the legacy of ancient colonialism (by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Etruscans) in shaping the modern-day population concentration and economic activity of the Mediterranean region. By combining historical data on ancient colonies and current data on population density and...