The paper addresses the following questions: what type of crisis is this? How can we put the events together in our minds so that we have a coherent, complete picture of the crisis? How can we put this crisis in its historical context and what are the consequences for the future of our society?...

This study is the first to explore long-run trends of numeracy for the 1820-1949 period in 165 countries, and its contribution to growth. Estimates of the long-run numeracy development of most countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, America, and Europe are presented, using age-heaping...

This paper seeks to add to the current debate about financial development and growth in the emerging world by looking at how different financial systems evolve: how and why financial structures change during various stages of development, how best to measure them, and seeing what practical...

Digitization and computer science have established a whole new set of methods to analyze large collections of texts. One of these methods is particularly promising for economic historians: topic models, statistical algorithms that automatically infer themes from large collections of texts. In...

This paper seeks to add to the current debate about financial development and growth in the emerging world by looking at how different financial systems evolve: how and why financial structures change during various stages of development, how best to measure them, and seeing what practical...

This essay looks at the bidirectional relationship between financial history and financial economics. It begins by giving a brief history of financial economics by outlining the main topics of interest to financial economists. It then documents and explains the increasing influence of financial...

We argue against the use of composite indices, such as the Human Development Index (HDI), in economic history. We show that the HDI can be interpreted as a formal representation of the analyst’s ethical system. We support our claim by introducing a new class of paternalistic social welfare...

We show that financial crises are preceded by changes in specific types of narrative information contained in newspaper article titles. Our novel international dataset and the resulting empirical evidence are gathered by integrating information from a large panel of economic news articles in...

I argue that economists have reasons internal to the way that evidence works in the sciences to re-discover the importance of the history of their own discipline. For it is a constitutive element of science - here conceived as an ongoing research practice (as opposed to as an explanatory...