This introductory piece provides some context to the special edition on business and economic history of Chile and Latin America. It also provides an introduction to better understanding research and method in business history while inviting for this field to be further developed in Chile.

This working paper provides a survey of the theoretical underpinnings for the various employment guarantee schemes, and discusses full employment policy experiences in the United States, Sweden, India, Argentina, and France. The theoretical and policy developments are delineated in a historical...

This paper explores the implications of Unified Growth Theory for the origins of existing differences in income per capita across countries. The theory sheds light on three fundamental layers of comparative development. It identifies the factors that have governed the pace of the transition from...

As part of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s commitment to supporting efforts to revitalize the economy of Springfield, Massachusetts, this paper analyzes the economic development approaches of other mid‐sized manufacturing‐oriented cities during the past half century. From among a...

Literature on convergence among Latin American countries is still scarce compared to other regions. Almost none of the research connects convergence to the economic history of Latin America and the usual finding is one speed of convergence assuming one globally stable steady-state. In this paper...

This introductory piece provides some context to the special edition on business and economic history of Chile and Latin America. It also provides an introduction to better understanding research and method in business history while inviting for this field to be further developed in Chile.

Although cross section relationships are often taken to indicate causation, and especially the important impact of economic growth on many social phenomena, they may, in fact, merely reflect historical experience, that is, similar leader-follower country patterns for variables that are causally...

Documentary evidence of the emergence and the eventual complete dominance of the Chinese mercantile traders (Sangleys) during the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines is first presented. We identify the critical traits in the Sangley mercantile genome and the new contractual and...

We analyze the evolution of the price of paintings in London auctions with a unique dataset of over 200,000 sales in the period 1780-1840. We build a price index for the representative painting through hedonic regressions controlling for the characteristics of auctions and paintings and for the...