We develop a parsimonious finance and endogenous growth model with microeconomic frictions in entrepreneurship and a role for credit constraints. We demonstrate that though an efficiency-growth relation will always exist, the efficiency-depth-growth relation may not. This has implications for...

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...

The development of a well adapted financial system was a main part of the successful Swedish economic modernization in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this paper it is shown that this development followed the pattern of a financial revolution. Major institutional and organizational...

During the Industrial Revolution, did population growth stimulate innovation, or did causality run primarily from innovation to growth? Previous research fails to explain why between 1700 and 1850: (i) most innovation originated in three clusters of cities in Britain, northern France, and the...

We analyse the emergence of the Greek merchant navy in the wider European context after the Treaty of Vienna, in particular that of the maritime islands - Hydra, Spetsai and Psara - during the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century, when Greece was still a part of the Ottoman...

This paper proposes a novel strategy for identifying the effects of import competition on economic outcomes that avoids standard concerns related to the endogeneity of trade policy and provides a consistent measure of exposure to trade over time. Conditioning on the level of import tariffs, our...