Successful apprenticeship is often explained by effective contract enforcement. But what happened when enforcement was weak? This paper reveals that within early modern London, England’s dominant centre for training, the city’s court provided apprentices with near automatic exits from their...

Based on a letter book of the London Baltic merchant Michael Mitford dating 1703-1707 this paper argues that the ability of merchant networks to secure property rights in long distance trade must be re-evaluated. Contrary to the argument of the New Institutional Economists, these were not...

We attempt to explain the severe 1920-21 recession, the roaring 1920s boom, and the slide into the Great Depression after 1929 in a unified framework. The model combines monopolistic product market competition with search frictions in the labor market, allowing for both individual and collective...

This study finds that the development process of the Kiryu silk weaving district in Japan from 1895 to 1930 can be divided at least into the two phases, i.e., Smithian growth based on the inter-firm division of labor using hand looms and Schumpeterian development based on factory system using...

My essay surveys a range of printed secondary sources going back to publications of the day (and includes research in primary sources) in order to revive a traditional and unresolved debate on economic connexions between the French and Industrial Revolutions. It argues that, on balance, the...

The economics literature is full of studies of monetary or currency unions ranging from the sterling area before 1914, to the Bretton Woods system later and the euro zone within the European Monetary Union today. A quick search in Econ-Lit returned over 10,000 entries among abstracts and...