This paper employs the concept of ‘defence news’ proposed by Ramey (2009) to develop a time series of shocks to UK defence spending in the interwar period at a quarterly frequency. ‘Defence news’ is the present value of changes to defence spending plans. Information on this is taken from...

This review essay looks at the recent books on the British Industrial Revolution by Robert Allen and Joel Mokyr. Both writers seek to explain Britain’s primacy. This paper offers a critical but sympathetic account of the main arguments of the two authors considering both the economic logic and...

This paper reviews the analysis of technological change by cliometricians. It focuses on lessons about total factor productivity (TFP) from growth accounting and on aspects of social capability that are conducive to the effective assimilation of new technology. Key messages are that when TFP...

This paper investigates the ability of the new economic geography to explain the persistence of the manufacturing belt in the United States around the turn of the 20th century using a model which subsumes both market-potential and factor-endowment arguments. The results show that market...

This paper reviews selected aspects of the history of UK supply-side policy in terms of their productivity implications. An important change after the 1970s which improved productivity performance was the adoption of policies to end protectionism and strengthen competition. A review of...

If the Eurozone follows the precedent of the 1930s, it will not survive. The attractions of escaping from the gold standard then were massive and they point to a strategy of devalue and default for today’s crisis countries. A fully-federal Europe with a banking union and a fiscal union is the...

We examine the geography of cotton textiles in Britain in 1838 to test claims about why the industry came to be so heavily concentrated in Lancashire. Our analysis considers both first and second nature aspects of geography including the availability of water power, humidity, coal prices, market...

This paper examines home bias in U.S. domestic trade in 1949 and 2007. We use a unique data set of 1949 carload waybill statistics produced by the Interstate Commerce Commission, and 2007 Commodity Flow Survey data. The results show that home bias was considerably smaller in 1949 than in 2007...

This paper examines the role of competition in productivity performance in Britain over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth...

This paper surveys the recent history of Western European growth. It concludes that this experience has been disappointing and that further reforms are desirable in many countries. The requirement for reform comes both from achieving ‘close-to-frontier’ status and from the opportunities...