Forced migrations and exiles are shocks that affect to the lives of millions of individuals. Among the consequences of this non-voluntary migration, the loss of a significant stock of human capital is of particular importance. The Republican exile in post-civil war Spain is an excellent case...

The city of Buenos Aires is an extreme case in immigration history since the native workers were less than one third of the labour force. This paper is the first attempt to present empirical evidence on occupations and wages for Buenos Aires ca. 1890s. Using a large dataset, we look at the...

Millions of immigrants chose Argentina as the land of opportunity during the era of mass migration. Two immigrant groups, Italians and Spaniards, dominated the immigration flows. Despite higher literacy and their linguistic advantages, in Buenos Aires Spaniards fared worse when compared to...

Basado en diversas fuentes primarias, este artículo presenta estimaciones de costo de vida y estándares de vida para Lima, Perú durante el siglo XIX. Durante esta centuria este país sufrió profundos vaivenes en la actividad económica debido a las guerras de la independencia, la guerra del...

This paper presents new estimations of per capita GDP in colonial times for the two pillars of the Spanish empire: Mexico and Peru. We find dynamic economies as evidenced by increasing real wages, urbanization, and silver mining. Their growth trajectory is such that both regions reduced the gap...

On the basis of a newly constructed dataset, this paper presents long-term series of the price levels, nominal wages, and real wages in Spanish Latin America – more specifically in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina – between ca. 1530 and ca. 1820. It synthesizes the work...

On the basis of a newly constructed dataset, this paper presents long-term series of the price levels, nominal wages, and real wages in Spanish Latin America – more specifically in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina – between ca. 1530 and ca. 1820. It synthesizes the work...

Recent scholarship claims that extractive colonial institutions explain the lackluster performance of Latin American economies today. We examine forced labor in colonial Peru. We find that while coercive labor institutions led to a drop in the indigenous population until the seventeenth century,...

In 2012 and again in 2015, the German government proposed sending German administrators to manage Greece's tax and privatization authorities. The idea was that shared governance would reduce corruption and root out inefficient practices. (In 2017 the Boston Globe proposed a similar arrangement...