Introduction / Alexander J. Field -- Social-overhead construction in Italys regions, 1861-1913 / Carlo Ciccarelli Stefano Fenoaltea -- Bilateral trade flows in Europe, 1857-1875 : a new dataset / Markus Lampe -- Gender, health and welfare in England and Wales since industrialisation / Bernard...

Technological breakthroughs and productivity growth / Harald Edquist, Magnus Henrekson -- New national bank loan rate estimates, 1887-1975 / Scott A. Redenius -- The net effect of railroads on stature in the postbellum period / Ebru Guven Solakoglu -- Growth in a protected environment :...

Amongst other European and US focussed topics, Volume 27 addresses: the macroeconomic aggregates for England, 1209-2004; capital accumulation in Spain, 1850-2000; British Estate Acts, 1600 to 1830. Notably there is also a contribution from the late William Parker , who chapter discusses historical...

The severity of the Great Depression in the United States varied by region. Most notably compared with the rest of the country, the South Atlantic states experienced a milder contraction while the Mountain states suffered more severely. The impact of the contraction was more" uniform across...

Census data show that the ratio of black to white unemployment rates, currently in excess of 2:1, was small or nonexistent before 1940, widened dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s, and widened again in the 1980s. The authors decompose changes in the unemployment gap over the years...

Although the substantial and persistent gap between the unemployment rates of African-Americans and whites in the United States first emerged in aggregate statistics covering the 1940s and 1950s, disaggregation reveals that the gap already existed in urban areas before 1940. Using...