New Economics Papers
on Business, Economic and Financial History
Issue of 2008‒11‒04
nine papers chosen by
  1. Belgium’s Expansionist History between 1870 and 1930: Imperialism and the Globalisation of Belgian Business By Abbeloos, Jan-Frederik
  2. How the Poor (and not-so-poor) Saved - Savings Banks in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ireland and America By Cormac Ó Gráda
  3. Fifty Years of Urban Accessibility : The Impact of Urban Railway Network on the Land Gradient in Industrializing Berlin By Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt; Nicolai Wendland
  4. Marriage formation as a process intermediary between migration and childbearing By Jan M. Hoem; Lesia Nedoluzhko
  5. Regularities and deviations in mortality trends of the developed world By Elisabetta Barbi
  6. Religion, Social Capital, and Business Bankruptcy in the United States, 1921-1932 By Bradley A. Hansen; Mary Eschelbach Hansen
  7. La transición hacia una economía urbana y el aumento del producto per cápita: el caso colombiano del siglo XX desde la perspectiva de Lucas By Carlos Esteban Posada; Jorge Andrés Tamayo
  8. Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia By Woessmann, Ludger; Becker, Sascha O.
  9. La transición hacia una economía urbana y el aumento del producto per cápita: el caso colombiano del siglo XX desde la perspectiva de Lucas By Carlos Esteban Posada; Jorge Andres Tamayo
  1. By: Abbeloos, Jan-Frederik
    Abstract: This chapter considers if and how the political action of imperialism and the globalisation of business influenced each other in Belgium between 1870 and 1930. In addition to the role that Belgian King Leopold II played in the territorial partition of Africa and the opening up of China, the period sees a growing amount of capital and industrial know-how from Belgium being invested in markets outside Europe. Before World War I, the globalisation of Belgian business and Belgian imperialism operated relatively independently of each other, leaving the financing of the imperial project open to other international investors while strong political support for the globalisation of Belgian business was absent in this small, neutral and open country. Only after the Belgian state took over Leopold’s Congo Free State in 1908 and World War I infused colonial (economic) policy with a stronger patriotic spirit, did Belgian foreign investments start to concentrate on the Congo. From the 1920s on, Belgian business fully seized the opportunities that imperialism had created earlier.
    Keywords: Belgium; business history; imperial history; globalization
    JEL: F15 F23 N13 N00 N14
    Date: 2008
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:11295&r=his
  2. By: Cormac Ó Gráda (University College Dublin)
    Date: 2008–10–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucn:wpaper:200822&r=his
  3. By: Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt (University of Hamburg, Department of Economics); Nicolai Wendland (KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
    Abstract: As the first to use an archival data set on historical land values of Berlin, Germany, from 1890 to 1936, we exploit exogenous variation in transport technology in order to test the validity of the monocentric city model. Endogenously determining the CBD, we conduct cross-section and timedifference analysis and model the land gradient in terms of straight-line distance and travel times. A counterfactual scenario indicates that a large proportion of urban decentralization is attributable to improvements in transport infrastructure. Controlling for spatial dependency, results suggest that the monocentric model fitted the city structure until the mid 20th century.
    Keywords: Transport Innovations, Land Values, Location Productivity, Economic History
    JEL: N7 N9 R33 O12
    Date: 2008–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kof:wpskof:08-208&r=his
  4. By: Jan M. Hoem (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Lesia Nedoluzhko (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany)
    Abstract: In studies of differences in fertility between migrants and non-migrants, marriage interferes because migration can be motivated by an impending marriage or can entail entry into a marriage market with new opportunities. One would therefore expect elevated fertility after migration, although a competing theory states that on the contrary fertility ought to be reduced in the time around the move because migration temporarily disturbs the life of the migrant. In any case marriage appears as a process that is intermediary between migration and childbearing. To handle such issues it pays to have a technique that allows the analyst to separate any disruptive effects of migration from any boosting effects of marriage in studies of childbearing. The purposes of the present paper is (i) to remind us that such a technique is available, in fact is straightforward, and (ii) to apply the technique to further analyze a set of data on migration and first-time parenthood in Kyrgyzstan recently used by the second author and Gunnar Andersson. The technique has the neat feature that it allows us to operate with several “clocks” at the same time. In the analysis of first births we keep track of time since migration (for migrants) and time since marriage formation (for the married) beside the respondent’s age (for women at childbearing ages); in other connections there may be more clocks. For such analyses we make use of a flexible graphical housekeeping device that allows the analyst to keep track of a feature like whether migration occurs before or after marriage, or at the same time. This is a half-century-old flow chart of statuses and transitions and is not much more complex that the famous Lexis diagram, which originated with Gustav Zeuner, as we now know. These reflexions were first presented at a symposium dedicated to Professor Zeuner.
    JEL: J1 Z0
    Date: 2008–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2008-015&r=his
  5. By: Elisabetta Barbi (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany)
    Abstract: By the second half of the 20th century, mortality patterns in industrialized countries showed a continuous tendency of reduction at all ages, even at the oldest ones. However, the pace of mortality decline considerably varies depending on the country. Furthermore, in a few cases, stagnation and even an unexpected reversed pattern have been observed in more recent years. In this paper a comparative analysis of mortality trends in several developed countries is performed. The aim of the paper is to locate deviations from expected mortality patterns, and to understand the reasons for these deviations. As a first step of the analysis, a new two-dimensional relational model is applied to mortality surfaces of the selected developed countries, between 1960 and 1999, for the age range 50-99. In the second step, mortality by cause of the countries with particular structural features is analyzed through the surfaces of leading causes of death.
    Keywords: mortality trends
    JEL: J1 Z0
    Date: 2008–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2008-014&r=his
  6. By: Bradley A. Hansen; Mary Eschelbach Hansen
    Abstract: We consider the value of social capital that derives from membership in a church. American states with larger churchgoing populations had lower business bankruptcy rates from 1921 to 1932, and states in which the churchgoing population was concentrated in few churches had business bankruptcy rates that were lower still. Both voluntary and involuntary bankruptcy were lower in states with higher church membership. The evidence suggests that church membership acted on bankruptcy through a safety net mechanism and not solely through indicating a preference for honoring commitment.
    Keywords: business bankruptcy, church membership, social capital
    JEL: N22 N82 K29
    Date: 2008–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:1508&r=his
  7. By: Carlos Esteban Posada; Jorge Andrés Tamayo
    Abstract: El ritmo de crecimiento económico colombiano exhibió una tendencia decreciente a lo largo del siglo XX. Una explicación basada en el modelo de Solow (una declinación del cambio técnico) nos parece demasiado alejada de la discusión de política económica. De otra parte, varios modelos de crecimiento endógeno no son pertinentes para el caso colombiano por diversas razones (por el mismo comportamiento ya mencionado de la tasa de crecimiento de la economía colombiana o porque son diseñados para países en la frontera tecnológica). En cambio, un modelo reciente de Lucas nos parece pertinente y genera un comportamiento de “u” invertida para la tasa de crecimiento económico (y, por tanto, una tendencia decreciente después de alcanzar su cima). Este trabajo intenta sacar provecho de sus alcances y limitaciones para interpretar el crecimiento colombiano del siglo XX, esto es, sus tendencias y “ciclos económicos largos” o diferencias positivas y negativas entre la tendencia generada al aplicar el modelo y el crecimiento observado en diferentes períodos específicos.
    Date: 2008–10–21
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000094:005111&r=his
  8. By: Woessmann, Ludger; Becker, Sascha O.
    Abstract: Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county's or town's distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.
    Keywords: Protestantism; education; gender gap
    Date: 2008–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:stl:stledp:2008-20&r=his
  9. By: Carlos Esteban Posada; Jorge Andres Tamayo
    Abstract: El ritmo de crecimiento económico colombiano exhibió una tendencia decreciente a lo largo del siglo XX. Una explicación basada en el modelo de Solow (una declinación del cambio técnico) nos parece demasiado alejada de la discusión de política económica. De otra parte, varios modelos de crecimiento endógeno no son pertinentes para el caso colombiano por diversas razones (por el mismo comportamiento ya mencionado de la tasa de crecimiento de la economía colombiana o porque son diseñados para países en la frontera tecnológica). En cambio, un modelo reciente de Lucas nos parece pertinente y genera un comportamiento de "u" invertida para la tasa de crecimiento económico (y, por tanto, una tendencia decreciente después de alcanzar su cima). Este trabajo intenta sacar provecho de sus alcances y limitaciones para interpretar el crecimiento colombiano del siglo XX, esto es, sus tendencias y "ciclos económicos largos" o diferencias positivas y negativas entre la tendencia generada al aplicar el modelo y el crecimiento observado en diferentes períodos específicos.
    Keywords: Producto per cápita; capital humano; sectores rural y urbano; costo social. Classification JEL: O11; O14; O15
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdr:borrec:534&r=his
General information on the NEP project can be found at https://nep.repec.org. For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at <director@nep.repec.org>. Put “NEP” in the subject, otherwise your mail may be rejected.
NEP’s infrastructure is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand.
This page is being maintained by Thomas Krichel. It was last updated on 2024‒05‒02 at 13:00.