nep-his New Economics Papers
on Business, Economic and Financial History
Issue of 2016‒03‒17
thirty-one papers chosen by
  1. How Was the Quantitative Easing Program of the 1930s Unwound? By Gabriel P. Mathy; Matthew Jaremski
  2. Spanish Agriculture in the Little Divergence By Álvarez-Nogal, Carlos; Prados de la Escosura, Leandro; Santiago-Caballero, Carlos
  3. "Spain - Eximbank's Billion Dollar Client": The Role of the US Financing the Spanish Nuclear Program By Mª del Mar Rubio-Varas y Joseba De la Torre; Joseba De la Torre
  4. Twentieth-century enterprise forms: Japan in comparative perspective By Leslie Hannah; Makoto Kasuya
  5. McCarthyism and the Mathematization of Economics By E. Roy Weintraub
  6. Reconstruction of annual money supply over the long run: The case of England, 1279-1870 By Nuno Palma
  7. Technology-Skill Complementarity in the Early Phase of Industrialization By Franck, Raphaël; Galor, Oded
  8. 25th anniversary conference management accounting research By Wim Van der Stede
  9. Inflación de costos: las devaluaciones de los años cincuenta y el brote populista de 1963 / Cost-push inflation: the devaluations of the fifties and the 1963 populist outbreak By Javier G. Gómez-Pineda
  10. The Founders of 16th Century Belgian Realism in Private International Law Doctrine By Irina V. Getman-Pavlova
  11. Returns to Education in Criminal Organizations: Did Going to College Help Michael Corleone? By Campaniello, Nadia; Gray, Rowena; Mastrobuoni, Giovanni
  12. A Questão Agrária entre duas Revoluções By Tiago Camarinha Lopes
  13. The Wild West is Wild: The Homicide Resource Curse By Mathieu Couttenier; Pauline Grosjean; Marc Sangnier
  14. Spatio-temporal analysis of micro economic activities in Rome reveals patterns of mixed-use urban evolution By Alessandro Fiasconaro; Emanuele Strano; Vincenzo Nicosia; Sergio Porta; Vito Latora
  15. Does housing wealth contribute to wealth inequality? A tale of two New Yorks By Guillaume Allegre; Xavier Timbeau
  16. A historical analysis of the US stock price index using empirical mode decomposition over 1791-2015 By Tiwari, Aviral Kumar; Dar, Arif Billah; Bhanja, Niyati; Gupta, Rangan
  17. THE “KELVIN CONJECTURE†IN MEDIVEAL ART IN THE MIDDLE EAST By HAKAN HISARLIGIL
  18. Resource rents, coercion, and local development : evidence from post-apartheid South Africa By Bastos,Paulo S. R.; Bottan,Nicolas Luis
  19. What’s In a Name? That Which We Call Capital Controls By Atish R. Ghosh; Mahvash Qureshi
  20. Cultural Beliefs, Values and Economics: A Survey By Marini, Annalisa
  21. Confidence, Fear and a Propensity to Gamble: The Puzzle of War and Economics in an Age of Catastrophe 1914-45 By Roger L. Ransom
  22. Deriving the factor endowment-commodity output relationship for Thailand (1920-1929) using a three-factor two-good model By Nakada, Yoshiaki
  23. Islamic finance: a review of the literature By Jean Yves MOISSERON; Bruno Laurent MOSCHETTO; Frédéric TEULON
  24. Colonial Legacy and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa By Rumman Khan; Oliver Morrissey; Paul Mosley
  25. Sobre la necesidad de una reforma agraria en España (1931-1936). Algunas consideraciones críticas By Ricardo Robledo Hernández y Ángel Luis González Esteban; Ángel Luis
  26. The origins, development, and fate of Clower’s ‘stock-flow’ general-equilibrium program By Romain Plassard
  27. How Rome enabled impersonal markets By Benito Arruñada
  28. Witch Memories Remain: a landscape history of Salem, Massachusetts By Rebecca Lush
  29. Ukrainian Architecture in 18th Century Russia: How and Why? By Lev Maciel
  30. Productividad total de los factores: Una aplicación VEC nacional y sectorial al caso colombiano (1965-2013) By Cristina Navarro Pérez; Carlos Arturo Cáceres
  31. Who is Lying on the Procrustean Bed?: Current Historians of the World, Denationalize Ourselves! By Naoki Odanaka
  1. By: Gabriel P. Mathy; Matthew Jaremski
    Abstract: Outside of the recent past, excess reserves have only concerned policymakers in one other period: the Great Depression of the 1930s. This historical episode thus provides the only guidance about the Fed's current predicament of how to unwind from the extensive Quantitative Easing program. Excess reserves in the 1930s were never actually unwound through a reduction in the monetary base. Nominal economic growth swelled required reserves while an exogenous reduction in monetary gold inflows due to war embargoes in Europe allowed banks to naturally reduce their excess reserves. Excess reserves fell rapidly in 1941 and would have unwound fully even without the entry of the United States into World War II. As such, policy tightening was at no point necessary and likely was even responsible for the 1937-1938 recession.
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:2016-01&r=his
  2. By: Álvarez-Nogal, Carlos; Prados de la Escosura, Leandro; Santiago-Caballero, Carlos
    Abstract: This paper explores the role of agriculture in Spain's contribution to the little divergence in Europe. On the basis of tithes, long-run trends in agricultural output are drawn. After a long period of relative stability, output suffered a severe contraction during 1570-1620, followed by stagnation to 1650, and steady expansion thereafter. Output per head shifted from a relatively high to a low path that persisted until the nineteenth century. The decline in agricultural output per head and per worker from a relatively high level contributed to Spain falling behind and, hence, to the Little Divergence in Europe. Output per worker moved along labour force in agriculture over the long run, supporting the depiction of Spain as a frontier economy. Institutional factors, in a context of financial and monetary instability and war, along climatic anomalies, provide explanatory hypotheses that deserve further research.
    Keywords: agriculture; early modern Spain; labour productivity; little divergence; tithes
    JEL: N53 O13 Q10
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11125&r=his
  3. By: Mª del Mar Rubio-Varas y Joseba De la Torre (Universidad Pública de Navarra); Joseba De la Torre
    Abstract: In 1972, Henry Kearns, President and Chairman, Export-Import Bank of the United States (Eximbank) visited the Official Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Madrid. The title of his speech “Spain—Eximbank’s Billion Dollar Client” gave notice of the important role that the public American bank had for financing the Spanish purchases of capital equipment: aircrafts, steel mills, satellite grown stations, power plants, etc. The heavy concentration on new power facilities at the time made Spain the fastest growing nuclear power developer in Europe, and the largest nuclear power buyer from the US with Eximbank’s support head-to-head with Japan. No other nation approached these two in that respect. Investigating archival materials from the Eximbank and the National Archives and Record Administration of the United States (NARA), we explore the financial facilities the US provided to the Spanish nuclear program, the size of the authorised credits and its evolution over time. It became apparent that the role of the US in pumping public money for exporting nuclear facilities to the world explain a great deal of the US quasi-monopoly of global nuclear market before the 1980s, and in particular for turning Spain into an early adopter and champion adopter of nuclear technology.
    Keywords: Nuclear energy, Eximbank, export subsidies.
    JEL: N2 N4 N5 N7 Q43 Q48
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ahe:dtaehe:1603&r=his
  4. By: Leslie Hannah; Makoto Kasuya
    Abstract: La Porta et al. see common law as most favorable to corporate development and economic growth, but Japanese legislators explicitly based their system on German civil law. However, Japan’s commercial code of 1899 omitted the GmbH (private company) form, which Guinnane et al. see as the jewel in the crown of Germany’s organizational menu. Neither apparent “mistake” retarded Japan’s adoption of the corporate form, because its commercial code offered flexible governance and liability options, implemented liberally. It was this liberal flexibility, not choice of legal family or hybrid corporate forms emphasized by previous writers, that drove corporatization forward in Japan and more widely. Surprisingly (given that Germany’s superficially fuller organizational menu predated Japan’s by many decades and the country was wealthier), by the 1930s Japan already had not only more corporations than Germany, but also more commandite partnerships (with some corporate characteristics). After the introduction of the yugen kaisha (private company) in 1940, corporate
    JEL: N0
    Date: 2016–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:65579&r=his
  5. By: E. Roy Weintraub
    Abstract: Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines—e.g. mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics—during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists’ desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that the claim is false.
    Keywords: Cold War, McCarthyism, mathematical economics, mathematization of economics, history of philosophy, RAND, Cowles Commission, Paul Lazarsfeld
    JEL: B2 B4 B5 C02 C10
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hec:heccee:2016-18&r=his
  6. By: Nuno Palma (European University Institue,University of Groningen)
    Abstract: I provide the first annual time series of coin and money supply estimates for about six hundred years of English history. I propose two main estimation methods. The first, which I call the Òdirect methodÓ, is used to measure the value of government-provided, legal-tender coin supply only. Additionally, I propose an Òindirect methodÓ which relies on a combination of information about nominal GDP with the value of coin supply or M2 known at certain benchmark periods. The latter permits estimating the growth of financial intermediation over time. The new methodologies which I set out here may serve as a blueprint for a similar reconstruction of coin and money supply series for other economies for which analogous data is available.
    Keywords: historical money supply, financial intermediation
    JEL: E10 E40 E51 N13
    Date: 2016–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0094&r=his
  7. By: Franck, Raphaël (Bar-Ilan University); Galor, Oded (Brown University)
    Abstract: The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that, in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly deskilling process, the industrial revolution was conducive for human capital formation, generating broad increases in literacy rates and educational attainment.
    Keywords: technology-skill complementarity, economic growth, industrialization, human capital, steam engine
    JEL: N33 N34 O14 O33
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9758&r=his
  8. By: Wim Van der Stede
    Abstract: To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Journal, the founding Editors of Management Accounting Research (MAR), Bob Scapens (Manchester Business School) and Michael Bromwich (LSE), organised a conference together with myself as the incoming Editor-in-Chief, at the London School of Economics and Political Science on Friday 17 April 2015. The conference was fittingly celebratory and characteristically vibrant and diverse due to the representation of a wide variety of interest areas, epistemological views, methodological approaches, career experiences, and geography as embodied by the 85 participants consisting of editorial board members, reviewers, authors and supporters of the Journal throughout its first quarter of a century, and counting.
    JEL: M40
    Date: 2015
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:65585&r=his
  9. By: Javier G. Gómez-Pineda
    Abstract: El artículo estudia la inflación en Colombia durante 1951-1963 de acuerdo al enfoque de presión de costos (cost push inflation). El artículo propone un modelo en el que la inflación responde a los aumentos salariales, la devaluación y la inflación de alimentos. El modelo incorpora una ecuación para la inflación de alimentos en función del fenómeno El Niño-Oscilación del Sur. Entre los resultados se argumenta que los ajustes masivos en los salarios y la tasa de cambio actuaron como importantes fuerzas expansivas de la inflación durante los programas de estabilización y como fuerzas contractivas de la misma durante los prolongados períodos comprendidos entre los ajustes. Los choques de oferta de alimentos desempeñaron un papel importante en la evolución de la inflación en el corto plazo. El análisis lleva a dos principales implicaciones de política. Primero, la evolución de la inflación en el corto plazo ha sido atribuida por la literatura a los cambios en el crecimiento del dinero, pero el enfoque de inflación de costos ofrece importantes puntos de vista sobre la evolución de la inflación en el corto plazo. Segundo, Colombia no llegó a la hiperinflación porque no persistió en el objetivo de aumentar los salarios reales. En vez de esto, permitió aumentos de precios y renunció a regla de indexación de los salarios. En consecuencia la inflación se mantuvo flexible y bajó rápidamente.****** The article studies Colombia’s inflation during 1951–1963 under the cost-push approach. In the model, inflation follows wage and exchange rate adjustments, as well as food inflation supply shocks. The model incorporates an equation for food inflation defined on El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon. The results show that massive adjustments in wages and in the exchange rate acted as major inflationary forces during the stabilization programs of the post war period and as disinflationary forces during the prolonged periods in between these programs. Food inflation supply shocks were important drivers of inflation in the short term. Two main policy implications arise. First, the evolution of inflation in the short term has been attributed in the literature to changes in the growth of money, but the cost-push approach provides important insights about the evolution of inflation in the short term. Second, Colombia did not experience hyperinflation because the authorities did not maintain the real wage objective. Instead, the authorities allowed prices to rise and gave up the wage indexation clause. As a consequence, inflation remained flexible and dropped rapidly.
    Keywords: Inflación de costos, espiral de precios y salarios, indexación, macroeconomía del populismo, mínimo vital y móvil / Cost push inflation, wage-price spiral, indexation, macroeconomics of populism, minimum wage
    JEL: N1 N16 E3 E52 E58
    Date: 2016–02–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000094:014204&r=his
  10. By: Irina V. Getman-Pavlova (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
    Abstract: This article restores to academic circulation the names of representatives of the 16th century Belgian School of Realism, who have been unjustly forgotten in modern Private International Law [PIL] doctrine—Nicolas Everhard, Pieter Peck and Johannes a Sande. These scholars are the founders of the Belgian-Dutch theory of conflicts of laws which anticipated the classic Dutch “comity” doctrine and provided the framework for the Anglo-American doctrine of the regulation of international civil relations. The theory of Belgian realism was first outlined by Everhard, Peck and Sande and was formed on the theory of statutes—the sole doctrine of PIL for 500 years. Belgian Realism is a separate direction in the theory of statutes which triggered the process of a strongly territorial concept of conflict resolution between choice of law rules of different states. However, despite their outstanding contribution to the legal practice and doctrine of their time, these scholars are not known to modern jurisprudence. The article concludes that Everhard, Peck and Sande developed the choice of law rules which are now adopted by modern legislation; moreover, their works may serve to develop international comity doctrine, which has been adopted by modern PIL.
    Keywords: Private International Law, the theory of statutes, 16th century, the Belgian-Dutch theory of conflicts of laws, Belgian Realism, Nicolas Everhard, Pieter Peck, Johannes a Sande
    JEL: Z
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:64/law/2016&r=his
  11. By: Campaniello, Nadia; Gray, Rowena; Mastrobuoni, Giovanni
    Abstract: Is there any return to education in criminal activities? This paper is one of the first to investigate whether education has not only a positive impact on legitimate, but also on illegitimate activities. We use as a case study one of the longest running criminal corporations in history: the Italian-American mafia. Its most successful members were capable businessmen, orchestrating crimes that required abilities that might be learned at school: extracting the optimal rent when setting up a racket, weighting interests against default risk when starting a loan sharking business or organizing supply chains, logistics and distribution when setting up a drug dealing system. We address this question by comparing mobsters to a variety of samples drawn from the United States 1940 Population Census, including a sample of their closest (non-mobster) neighbors. We document that mobsters have one year less education than their neighbors on average. We find that mobsters have significant returns to education of 7.5-8.5 percent, which is only slightly smaller than their neighbors and 2-5 percentage points smaller than for U.S.-born men or male citizens. Mobster returns were consistently about twice as large as a sample of Italian immigrants or immigrants from all origin countries. Within that, those charged with complex crimes including embezzlement and bookmaking have the highest returns.We conclude that private returns to education exist even in the illegal activities characterized by a certain degree of complexity as in the case of organized crime in mid-twentieth century United States.
    Keywords: Returns to education; organized crime; mafia; Italian-American Immigration; Federal Bureau of Narcotics; 1940 Census
    JEL: L1
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esx:essedp:16188&r=his
  12. By: Tiago Camarinha Lopes (FACE-UFG, Ciências Econômicas)
    Abstract: This article develops the idea that the current social struggle for land integrates two contradictory elements, which necessarily exclude each other as capitalism advances: the Bourgeois Revolution and the Socialist Revolution. To explore this prospect, which may elucidate existing internal conflicts within the movement of struggle for land, the text provides a brief theoretical review on the element land in Book 3 of Capital. It then summarizes the trajectory of the debate in the twentieth century. The notion that the organization of land use by society is no longer placed as a condition for capitalist development, but as a political element between two mutually exclusive projects (capitalism and socialism), is developed in the conclusion.
    Keywords: Political Economy, Agrarian Question, land, revolution, Lenin, Kautsky
    JEL: B51 Q10
    Date: 2014–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ufb:wpaper:044&r=his
  13. By: Mathieu Couttenier (University of Lausanne); Pauline Grosjean (School of Economics, University of New South Wales, Sydney); Marc Sangnier (Aix-Marseille University (Aix-Marseille School of Economics), CNRS & EHESS)
    Abstract: We document interpersonal violence as a dimension of the resource curse. We rely on a historical natural experiment in the United States, where mineral discoveries occurred sometimes before, sometimes after formal institutions were established in the county of discovery. In places where mineral discoveries occurred before formal institutions were established, there were more homicides per capita historically and the effect has persisted to this day. Today, the share of homicides and assaults explained by the historical circumstances of mineral discoveries is comparable to the effect of education or income. Our results imply that short-term and quasi-exogenous variations in the institutional environment can lead to large and persistent differences in cultural and institutional development.
    Keywords: Homicide, Resource Curse, Mineral Discoveries, US
    JEL: K42 N31 O14 Z13
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aim:wpaimx:1605&r=his
  14. By: Alessandro Fiasconaro; Emanuele Strano; Vincenzo Nicosia; Sergio Porta; Vito Latora
    Abstract: Understanding urban growth is one with understanding how society evolves to satisfy the needs of its individuals in sharing a common space and adapting to the territory. We propose here a quantitative analysis of the historical development of a large urban area by investigating the spatial distribution and the age of commercial activities in the whole city of Rome. We find that the age of activities of various categories presents a very interesting double exponential trend, with a transition possibly related to the long-term economical effects determined by the oil crisis of the Seventies. The diversification of commercial categories, studied through various measures of entropy, shows, among other interesting features, a saturating behaviour with the density of activities. Moreover, different couples of commercial categories exhibit over the years a tendency to attract in space. Our results demonstrate that the spatio-temporal distribution of commercial activities can provide important insights on the urbanisation processes at work, revealing specific and not trivial socio-economical dynamics, as the presence of crisis periods and expansion trends, and contributing to the characterisation of the maturity of urban areas.
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1602.08374&r=his
  15. By: Guillaume Allegre (OFCE); Xavier Timbeau (OFCE)
    Abstract: In Capital in the 21st century (hereafter Capital), Thomas Piketty points outthe risk of a concentration of wealth in the twenty-first century that would threaten the social justice and meritocratic values of our democratic societies.The main force of divergence is due to the fact that net returns on capital (r) are expected to be greater than the growth of the economy (g), or: “r>g”.According to Piketty, this will lead to two undesirable consequences: firstly,wealth will have a tendency to concentrate in the hands of a few; secondly,constituted wealth will tend to dominate accumulated wealth from labour:“the past devours the future”.
    Keywords: Inequality of income; Housing wealth; Wealth inequality
    Date: 2015–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/59b5l4afcq8qdb7ih17aej5f5k&r=his
  16. By: Tiwari, Aviral Kumar; Dar, Arif Billah; Bhanja, Niyati; Gupta, Rangan
    Abstract: In this paper, the dynamics of Standard and Poor's 500 (S&P 500) stock price index is analysed within a time-frequency framework over a monthly period 1791:08-2015:05. Using the Empirical Mode Decomposition technique, the S&P 500 stock price index is divided into different frequencies known as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and one residual. The IMFs and the residual are then reconstructed into high frequency, low frequency and trend components using the hierarchical clustering method. Using different measures, it is shown that the low frequency and trend components of stock prices are relatively important drivers of the S&P 500 index. These results are also robust across various subsamples identified based on structural break tests. Therefore, US stock prices have been driven mostly by fundamental laws rooted in economic growth and longterm returns on investment.
    Keywords: Empirical Mode Decomposition,stock prices,S&P 500 Index,United States
    JEL: C22 G10
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:20169&r=his
  17. By: HAKAN HISARLIGIL (MELIKSAH UNIVERSITY)
    Abstract: This study brings a new outlook to the two dimensional decorative tiling in Medieval Art in the Middle East by exploring their three dimensional content in a scientific context. The results of the study suggest that the some abstract geometrical patterns used in decorative tiling are the clear evident of an ancient mathematical problem of space-filling known in the scientific literature as “Kelvin Conjecture†. Like many other theories developed on the issue by a number of well-known thinkers such as Plato, Aristoteles, Pappus, Ibn Al-Salah, Ibn Rushd, and Kepler throughout history right up to the present day, “Kelvin Conjecture†explores simply the answer to the problem of most efficient space-filling arrangement of similar cells of equal volume with minimum surface area. In 1887, Lord Kelvin proposed that the fourteen-face truncated octahedron with a slight curvature of the hexagonal faces was the most efficient form. Although it was outdated by the Weaire–Phelan structure discovered in 1993, the conjecture is still of the interest in the field of science investigating if there is a more efficient solution. Hence, in this study, by analyzing various examples of this particular tiling composed of superposed octagons as suggested by Hankin in 1905, it is concluded that the layout of these two dimensional decorative patterns represent the Kelvin conjecture in the Medieval Era.
    Keywords: Kelvin Conjecture, Medieval Art, Geometry, Ornament,Tiling.
    JEL: Z00 Z00
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sek:iacpro:3305816&r=his
  18. By: Bastos,Paulo S. R.; Bottan,Nicolas Luis
    Abstract: This paper examines how the dismantling of coercive institutions associated with the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 affected the distribution of rents from natural resource exports. It identifies the interplay between coercive institutions and natural resource rents as an important driver of local development. Using data from the 1996 census, the paper documents large income gaps between communities located just-inside and just-outside the former self-governing territories set aside for black inhabitants. Examining relative changes between 1996 and 2011, the paper finds that spatial income convergence was considerably stronger among marginalized communities with higher initial exposure to resource rents. These results accord with standard bargaining theory in which the dismantling of coercive institutions improves the negotiating position of unionized workers in the mining industry.
    Keywords: Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Emerging Markets,Housing&Human Habitats,Investment and Investment Climate
    Date: 2016–02–22
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7572&r=his
  19. By: Atish R. Ghosh; Mahvash Qureshi
    Abstract: This paper investigates why controls on capital inflows have a bad name, and evoke such visceral opposition, by tracing how capital controls have been used and perceived, since the late nineteenth century. While advanced countries often employed capital controls to tame speculative inflows during the last century, we conjecture that several factors undermined their subsequent use as prudential tools. First, it appears that inflow controls became inextricably linked with outflow controls. The latter have typically been more pervasive, more stringent, and more linked to autocratic regimes, failed macroeconomic policies, and financial crisis—inflow controls are thus damned by this “guilt by association.†Second, capital account restrictions often tend to be associated with current account restrictions. As countries aspired to achieve greater trade integration, capital controls came to be viewed as incompatible with free trade. Third, as policy activism of the 1970s gave way to the free market ideology of the 1980s and 1990s, the use of capital controls, even on inflows and for prudential purposes, fell into disrepute.
    Keywords: Capital controls;Capital inflows;International financial system;Globalization;Financial crises;Capital flows;capital controls, capital flows, gold standard, interwar period, Bretton Woods
    Date: 2016–02–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:16/25&r=his
  20. By: Marini, Annalisa
    Abstract: The present work reviews the relation between culture and economics; in doing so, we often distinguish between the historical component of culture (i.e. inherited values) and its contemporaneous component (i.e. social interactions). First, the paper emphasizes which cultural traits are relevant in economics, reviews situations where culture affects economic outcomes and addresses the relevance of culture across time and space. Then, it explains the theoretical framework of reference for the transmission of both contemporaneous and inherited culture. Finally, it presents econometric techniques available to the researchers and suitable to investigate the impact of culture on economic outcomes, providing suggestions for future research.
    Keywords: Contemporaneous Culture, Inherited Culture, Cultural Econometrics
    JEL: C0 Z1
    Date: 2016–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:69747&r=his
  21. By: Roger L. Ransom (Department of Economics, University of California Riverside)
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucr:wpaper:201603&r=his
  22. By: Nakada, Yoshiaki
    Abstract: None
    Keywords: None
    JEL: D58 F11
    Date: 2015–12–16
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:69654&r=his
  23. By: Jean Yves MOISSERON; Bruno Laurent MOSCHETTO; Frédéric TEULON
    Date: 2016–02–18
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipg:wpaper:2014-93&r=his
  24. By: Rumman Khan; Oliver Morrissey; Paul Mosley
    Abstract: Although growth has improved substantially in most African countries in recent years, poverty across the continent has fallen very little in the aggregate. There have been strong poverty reduction performances in some countries, but others exhibit higher poverty rates now than in 1990 despite economic growth. This paper seeks to understand the reasons for this variance; why there are apparently ‘two Africas’, one with an ability to reduce poverty and one without. The main argument is that some of the reasons for this difference are rooted in colonial times. Countries with strong smallholder cash crop sectors emerged into independence with broad-based labour-intensive economies supporting a more equitable income distribution conducive to inclusive growth and poverty reduction compared to initially more inequitable mineral resource and large farm based economies. This did not necessarily determine the post-colonial path: many peasant export economies achieved no poverty reduction (often because of little growth), and some mine/plantation economies did achieve poverty reduction. The key reasons for this evolution lie in the motivation and ability of African elites to form pro-poor coalitions, which in some cases were then able to implement policies supporting a pro-poor pattern of growth.
    Keywords: Poverty, sub-Saharan Africa, colonial legacy, inclusive growth
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notcre:16/01&r=his
  25. By: Ricardo Robledo Hernández y Ángel Luis González Esteban (Universidad de Salamanca y Universitat Pompeu Fabra); Ángel Luis (Universidad de Salamanca)
    Abstract: Land reform in Spain is usually considered as something negative, being this approach reinforced by both the shortness and the violent interruption of the Second Spanish Republic regime. This paper analyses some of the dissenting literature in Spanish agrarian reformism. We first refer to those opinions which, despite their critical nature, do not question the importance of the land problem in the thirties, and afterwards we analyze those which tend to minimize it. Most works belonging to the first category are primarily concerned with criticizing productivism. More specifically, they have focused on demonstrating the logic and the efficiency of large estates while maintaining a certain degree of skepticism about the idea of land redistribution as a driver of agricultural development. On the other hand, most investigations belonging to the second field of literature argue that markets were relatively efficient and therefore land reform was unnecessary or even counter-productive. Our goal is to demonstrate the feasibility and appropriateness of the Spanish land reform in the political context of the thirties.
    Keywords: land reform, latifundia, small farms, inequality
    JEL: Q15 Q18 R14
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ahe:dtaehe:1604&r=his
  26. By: Romain Plassard
    Abstract: Before becoming the hallmark of macroeconomics à la Wynne Godley, the ‘stock-flow’ analysis was already developed in microeconomics and general equilibrium theory. Basically, the goal was to study the formation of economic plans and the determination of market prices when individuals were supposed to consume, produce, and hold commodities. It is acknowledged that Robert W. Clower was a central figure in this theoretical context. Yet, for both his contemporaries and for historians, his contributions remained essentially technical. No attention was paid to the theoretical project underlying the statics and dynamics analyses of his ‘stock-flow’ price theory. My paper aims to fill this gap. In light of his doctoral dissertation, I show that the elaboration of ‘stock-flow’ market models was part of a project aiming at offering sound microfoundations to a Keynesian business cycle model. I analyze the origins of this microfoundation program, trace its development, and discuss its fate.
    JEL: B2 E12 E32 D4
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hec:heccee:2016-16&r=his
  27. By: Benito Arruñada
    Abstract: Impersonal exchange increases trade and specialization opportunities, encouraging economic growth. However it requires the support of sophisticated public institutions. This paper explains how Classical Rome provided such support in the main areas of economic activity by relying on public possession as a titling device, enacting rules to protect innocent acquirers in agency contexts, enabling the extended family to act as a contractual entity, and diluting the enforcement of personal obligations which might collide with impersonal exchange. Focusing on the institutions of impersonal exchange, it reaches a clear positive conclusion on the market-facilitating role of the Roman state because such institutions have unambiguously positive effects on markets. Moreover, being impersonal, these beneficial effects are also widely distributed across society instead of accruing disproportionately to better-connected individuals.
    Keywords: property rights, enforcement, transaction costs, Roman law, impersonal exchange, personal exchange, New Institutional Economics, Law and Economics.
    JEL: D1 D23 G38 K11 K12 K14 K22 K36 L22 N13 O17 P48
    Date: 2016–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:upf:upfgen:1509&r=his
  28. By: Rebecca Lush (University of Sydney)
    Abstract: This paper aims to explore how Salem, Massachusetts has remembered the 1692 Witchcraft Trials. This is a very large and comprehensive topic so focus has been narrowed to observe how the landscape of Salem has been transformed in memoriam. In the period post-1692 Witch Trials there was active forgetting in Salem. A stigma surrounded the trials and their occurrence was sidelined in favour of industrializing the city. Beginning just prior to the 1960s were small, concerted efforts to bring the trials to the attention of the public. The landscape of the city began to alter – a process that has continued till this day. In the 1990s and 2000s, full-scale memorialization of the Witch Trials has left its mark on the landscape. Memorials, museums and stores are now found at the heart of the city all recapturing a once forgotten memory.This paper will specifically focus on the Witch Trials Memorial unveiled in 1992. The memorial has replaced an abandoned park in the middle of Salem, adjusting the tone of the space and its purpose. From this one memorial the culmination of Salem’s memorialization process can be observed and its impact on the landscape understood.
    Keywords: Salem, Witchcraft, Landscape, Memorials, Memorialization
    JEL: N90 N92
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sek:iacpro:3304896&r=his
  29. By: Lev Maciel (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
    Abstract: Many buildings with Ukrainian architectural features were built in 18th century Russia in the milieu of intense cultural exchange between Russia and Ukraine. The research aims to discuss how exactly and why Ukrainian elements were used in Russian architecture. Volume organization and decoration of Russian buildings having Ukrainian features are analyzed and compared. The results reveal a clear distinction between the buildings which intentionally copy Ukrainian models or singular elements and those unintentionally using some Ukrainian features as elements of architectural fashion. The detailed analysis of such cases is invaluable for the understanding of Russian architectural transformation in the 18th century
    Keywords: Russian Architecture, Ukraine, Naryshkin Style, Mannerism, Baroque, Siberia, renovation, transformation, Orthodox church
    JEL: Z
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:125hum2016&r=his
  30. By: Cristina Navarro Pérez; Carlos Arturo Cáceres
    Abstract: En el presente trabajo se calcula la Productividad Total de los Factores (PTF) para la economía colombiana a nivel sectorial y nacional. Se parte del planteamiento del modelo de Solow-Swan con cambio tecnológico como potenciador del trabajo y se estima una función de producción tradicional neoclásica de tipo Cobb-Douglas para los diferentes sectores y a nivel nacional mediante un Modelo de Vector de Corrección de Errores (VEC). Los resultados obtenidos muestran que la PTF de toda la economía es de 0,3% y que la tasa de crecimiento del cambio tecnológico según la productividad del trabajo es de 0,408%. Por su parte a nivel sectorial las tasas crecen de manera disímil.
    Keywords: Productividad Total de los Factores, Residuo de Solow, Vector de Corrección de Errores, Modelo Solow-Swan.
    JEL: C32 O47
    Date: 2016–01–15
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000176:014241&r=his
  31. By: Naoki Odanaka
    Date: 2016–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:toh:tergaa:342&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.