An unresolved question concerning post-Civil War U.S. industrialization is the degree to which import tariffs protected domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. This paper considers the impact of import tariffs on the domestic pig iron industry, the basic building block of the entire...

Many of the new member states as well as candidate and accession countries of the EU are confident that membership will result in substantially increased inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing. This paper discusses the policy issues and challenges that cohesion and accession...

Blockchains are the distributed, decentralised ledger technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We apply Oliver Williamson's transactions cost analysis to the blockchain consensus mechanism. Blockchains reduce the costs of opportunism but are not “trustless”. We show that...

Why are the East sides of former industrial cities like London or New York poorer and more deprived? We argue that this observation is the most visible consequence of the historically unequal distribution of air pollutants across neighborhoods. In this paper, we geo-locate nearly 5,000...

In nineteenth century America, blacksmiths were a fixture in every village, town and city, producing a diverse range of products from axes to wheels and services from repairs to horse-shoeing. In constructing his historical GNP accounts Robert Gallman opted to exclude these...