In assessments of modern Spain's economic progress and living standards inadequate natural resources, inefficient institutions, lack of education and entrepreneurship, and foreign dependency are frequently blamed for the poor performance up to mid-twentieth century, but no persuasive arguments...

Among the characteristics of Spanish financial crises over the last 165 years, we highlight their relatively high frequency and, since 1973, their severity (including 2008, the most severe crisis yet). By analysing monetary policy regimes, financial structure, and the main crisis determinants...

The current productivity slowdown has stimulated research on the causes of growth. We investigate here the proximate determinants of long-term growth in Spain. Over the last 170 years output per hour worked raised nearly 24-fold dominating GDP growth, while hours worked per person shrank by...

This study analyzes how state capacity shapes the local impact of national policies by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in the regional expansion of the state. It uses the local discontinuity created by the boundary of the largest peasant rebellion in 18th century Russia where the state...

The financial crises of 2007-2008 and the subsequent worldwide recession show the importance of exploring the correlation between financial and real crises. Starting from our new estimation of the Italian business cycle (Bartoletto et al., 2017), we analyze the linkage between banking crises and...

We describe Germany's rise as an industrial power in the late 19th century through radical innovation and entrepreneurship, and contrast this with the post-World War II period. This latter period, although it contained the German economic miracle, was nevertheless a period during which...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

This paper presents new monthly capital gains, dividend yield, and total return indices for common equities quoted on British stock exchanges from 1829 to 1929. As well as creating an all-share index, we create a blue-chip index of the 30 largest companies, which we splice to the Financial Times...

Existing methods of reconstructing historical Euro-zone data by aggregation of the individual countries' data raises numerous difficulties due to past exchange rate changes. The approach proposed here is designed to avoid such distortions, and aggregate exactly when exchange rates are fixed. In...

This paper is a thoroughly revised and extended version of an article firstly published in the anthology "Moderne Wirtschaftsgeschichte" (München: Oldenbourg) in 1996. This book is an introduction to modern economic history for historians and economists. Accordingly this paper has to two...