nep-his New Economics Papers
on Business, Economic and Financial History
Issue of 2022‒07‒25
23 papers chosen by



  1. Grotius Among the English Merchants: Mare Liberum and Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Early Seventeenth Century By Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak
  2. The reconstruction of back data for Italy’s balance of payments and international investment position (1945-1969) By Enrico Tosti
  3. Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century By Elisa Jácome; Ilyana Kuziemko; Suresh Naidu
  4. The Intergenerational Transmission of College: Evidence from the 1973 Coup in Chile By Bautista, María Angélica; González, Felipe; Martínez, Luis R.; Muñoz, Pablo; Prem, Mounu
  5. Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860–2020 By Ellora Derenoncourt; Chi Hyun Kim; Moritz Kuhn; Moritz Schularick
  6. Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Combat Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France By Julia Cage; Anna Dagorret; Pauline Grosjean; Saumitra Jha
  7. The Anatomy of the Global Saving Glut By Luis Bauluz; Filip Novokmet; Moritz Schularick
  8. What drove the profitability of colonial firms?: Labour coercion and trade preferences on the Sena Sugar Estates (1920-74) By Sam Jones; Peter Gibbon
  9. The life and works of Domenico Mario Nuti, 1937–2020: an appreciation By Estrin, Saul; Uvalic, Milica
  10. Abraham Lincoln and the Corwin Amendment - The Infamous ?Ghost Version? of the 13th Amendment By Julia Fodor
  11. The evolution of early hominin food production and sharing By Ingela Alger; Slimane Dridi; Jonathan Stieglitz; Michael Wilson
  12. Comment on Hubmer, Krusell & Smith “Sources of U.S. wealth inequality: past, present, and future” By Moll, Ben
  13. Experiments in Finance – A Survey of Historical Trends By Christoph Huber; Michael Kirchler
  14. The shifts and the shocks: bank risk, leverage, and the macroeconomy By Kuvshinov, Dmitry; Richter, Björn; Zimmermann, Kaspar
  15. The First Global Credit Crisis By Stein Berre; Paul Kosmetatos; Asani Sarkar
  16. J’Accuse! Antisemitism and Financial Markets in the time of the Dreyfus Affair By Quoc-Anh Do; Roberto Galbiati; Benjamin Marx; Miguel Serrano
  17. Wealth Inequality in Interwar Poland By Marcin Wroński
  18. Exploring the most influential papers in Vietnam's political economy in the past ten years By Phenikaa, ISR
  19. Recounting France’s trade unions By Cyprien Batut; Ulysse Lojkine; Paolo Santini
  20. Hasty Ethics Can Kill: How Vilified Pipelines Helped to Tame Jihad in Sudan and Chad By Azam, Jean-Paul
  21. Essays on economic geography, migration and transport infrastructurg By Florin L. Cucu
  22. The role played by large firms in generating income inequality: UK FTSE 100 pay practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries By Willman, Paul; Pepper, Alexander
  23. Status of the U.S. Sugar Industry and Reflections on 36 Years on the Sugar Beat By Roney, Jack

  1. By: Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak (The American University of Paris)
    Abstract: Hugo Grotius was a widely read and influential figure in seventeenth-century England. Whereas later generations portrayed him as a forefather to modern theories of natural and international law, the publication of Mare Liberum (1609) offered a grounded argument for free trade against the restrictions imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. But Grotius's notion of free trade, of course, was far removed from the later ideal of Richard Cobden. His model of commercial organization was firmly anchored on the chartered mercantile company, and he served as a spokesperson for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the Anglo-Dutch Conferences of 1613 and 1615, which sought to appease growing tensions among Dutch and English trading interests in Asia. As the diplomatic and economic relations between England and the Dutch Republic progressively deteriorated during the early decades of the seventeenth century, Grotius's rendition of the law of nations came increasingly to be regarded as a rationalization of Dutch dominance over long-distance trade routes. English commentators, who wished to emulate Dutch success but feared aggression and subordination, had to fashion a different framework of international politics to sustain their vision of an emerging English maritime empire. Tracing the uses of Mare Liberum in the mercantile literature of early Stuart England, the paper will study how this foundational work of modern international thought shaped the political economic discourse of English merchants, as well as their supporters and adversaries in the political arena. Changing attitudes toward Grotius's arguments will help us identify the origins of certain ideas about empire that later came to the fore by the time of the Navigation Acts and the Anglo-Dutch wars. We will thus explore how Grotius's version of the law of nations -- before it was retrospectively converted into a cornerstone of liberal internationalism -- was entangled in concrete disputes between rival imperial projects.
    Keywords: Hugo Grotius,Mare Liberum,free trade,British Empire,fisheries
    Date: 2022–06–15
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03695699&r=
  2. By: Enrico Tosti (Bank of Italy)
    Abstract: The changeover to the IMF’s sixth Balance of Payments Manual (BPM6) has meant a significant revision of the international standards for compiling external statistics (flows and stocks). This statistical work reconstructs these statistics for Italy between the immediate post-war period and 1969, extending previous research that covered the period between 1970 and the second half of the 1990s. The methodological approach adopted was to rely as much as possible on the available data, mainly sourced from the Bank of Italy, although strict compliance with BPM6 standards was not always possible, mainly due to the lack of some statistical information in the historical data. The possibility of having longer time series nonetheless widens the scope for the long-term analysis of real and financial phenomena concerning Italy’s external economic relations.
    Keywords: balance of payments, international investment position, time series reconstruction, back data
    JEL: C82 F00 N14 Y1
    Date: 2022–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_694_22&r=
  3. By: Elisa Jácome (Stanford University); Ilyana Kuziemko (Princeton University); Suresh Naidu (Columbia University)
    Abstract: We present the first estimates of long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for samples that are representative of the full U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that ask about father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show a robust increase in mobility between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts, about half of which is driven by absolute convergence in racial income gaps. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly Black women, considerably overstates mobility throughout the 20th century.
    Keywords: mobility, minorities, racial income gaps
    JEL: H00 J15 J16 N3
    Date: 2021–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pri:cepsud:302&r=
  4. By: Bautista, María Angélica; González, Felipe; Martínez, Luis R.; Muñoz, Pablo; Prem, Mounu
    Abstract: We study the transmission of higher education across generations using the arrival of the Pinochet dictatorship to Chile in 1973 as natural experiment. Pinochet promoted a large contraction in the number of seats opened for new students across all universities. Using census data, we find that parents who reached college age shortly after 1973 experienced a sharp decline in college enrollment. Decades after democratization, we observe that their children are also less likely to enroll in higher education. The results imply large and persistent downstream effects of educational policies implemented half a century ago.
    Keywords: Intergenerational transmission; higher education; dictatorship
    JEL: I23 H52
    Date: 2022–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rie:riecdt:90&r=
  5. By: Ellora Derenoncourt (Princeton University); Chi Hyun Kim (University of Bonn); Moritz Kuhn (University of Bonn); Moritz Schularick (University of Bonn, Sciences Po Paris)
    Abstract: The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent. In this paper, we construct the first continuous series on white-to-Black per capita wealth ratios from 1860 to 2020, drawing on historical census data, early state tax records, and historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, among other sources. Incorporating these data into a parsimonious model of wealth accumulation for each racial group, we document the role played by initial conditions, income growth, savings behavior, and capital returns in the evolution of the gap. Given vastly different starting conditions under slavery, racial wealth convergence would remain a distant scenario, even if wealth-accumulating conditions had been equal across the two groups since Emancipation. Relative to this equal-conditions benchmark, we find that observed convergence has followed an even slower path over the last 150 years, with convergence stalling after 1950. Since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again as capital gains have predominantly benefited white households, and income convergence has stopped.
    Keywords: Wealth gap, Racial wealth gap, inequality, historical data
    JEL: D63
    Date: 2022–05
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pri:cepsud:296&r=
  6. By: Julia Cage (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Anna Dagorret (Stanford University); Pauline Grosjean (UNSW - University of New South Wales [Sydney]); Saumitra Jha (Stanford University)
    Abstract: Can heroes legitimize strongly-proscribed and repugnant political behaviors? We exploit the purposefully arbitrary rotation of French regiments to measure the legitimizing effects of heroic credentials. 53% of French line regiments happened to rotate under a specific general, Philippe Pétain, during the pivotal WWI battle of Verdun (1916). Using recently declassified intelligence data on 95,314 individuals, we find the home municipalities of regiments serving under Pétain at Verdun raised 7% more Nazi collaborators during the Pétain led Vichy regime (1940-44). The effects are similar across joining Fascist parties, German forces, paramilitaries that hunted Jews and the Resistance, and collaborating economically. These municipalities also increasingly vote for right-wing parties between the wars. The voting effects persist after WWII, becoming particularly salient during social crises. We argue these results reflect the complementary role of the heroes of Verdun in legitimizing and diffusing the authoritarian values of their former leader.
    Keywords: Heroes,Leaders,Democratic Values,Autocracy,Identity,Networks,Votes,Legitimacy
    Date: 2020–12–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpspec:hal-03389171&r=
  7. By: Luis Bauluz (University of Bonn, WIL - World Inequality Lab); Filip Novokmet (University of Bonn, WIL - World Inequality Lab); Moritz Schularick (Institut d'Études Politiques [IEP] - Paris, University of Bonn, CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research - CEPR)
    Abstract: This paper provides a household-level perspective on the rise of global saving and wealth since the 1980s. We calculate asset-specific saving flows and capital gains across the wealth distribution for the G3 economies-the U.S., Europe, and China. In the past four decades, global saving inequality has risen sharply. The share of household saving flows coming from the richest 10% of household increased by 60% while saving of middle class households has fallen sharply. The most important source for the surge in top-10% saving was the secular rise of global corporate saving whose ultimate owners the rich households are. Housing capital gains have supported wealth growth for middle-class households despite falling saving and rising debt. Without meaningful capital gains in risky assets, the wealth share of the bottom half of the population declined substantially in most G3 economies.
    Keywords: N32 Income and wealth inequality,household portfolios,historical micro data
    Date: 2022–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-03693216&r=
  8. By: Sam Jones; Peter Gibbon
    Abstract: The magnitude of returns to colonial-era investments in Africa has been addressed in an extensive literature, as have the nature and legacies of extractive colonial institutions. However, the link between these institutions and the profitability of firms remains unclear. We reconstruct the annual financial records of Sena Sugar Estates in Portuguese East Africa (today's Mozambique) over the period 1920-74 to probe the contributions of forced labour and preferential trade arrangements to the performance of the firm.
    Keywords: Mozambique, Sugarcane, Forced labour, Trade preferences, Colonialism, Profitability
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2022-70&r=
  9. By: Estrin, Saul; Uvalic, Milica
    Abstract: It is challenging to provide an encompassing portrait of Mario Nuti's life and works: he was an exceptional man, who made significant intellectual contributions across a wide range of fields, as well as inspiring generations of students, colleagues and the profession in general, for more than fifty years. A brilliant debater and controversialist, he was equally at home in economic theory and in giving policy advice, and over the decades he had made significant contributions to many branches of the discipline. In this memorial article, we try to give a flavour of the man and his work, hopefully reminding the conoscenti of Mario's perceptive and original work, while introducing a new generation of scholars to his distinctive take on the field of economics.
    JEL: J1
    Date: 2021–06–23
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:111911&r=
  10. By: Julia Fodor (Károli Gáspár University)
    Abstract: Most people would find it hard to believe how far Abraham Lincoln was prepared to go in political compromise in order to save the Union from secession. It is still hardly known or discussed that while Lincoln was preparing to assume office in the early weeks of 1861 he gave his active support to a piece of legislation that would have given permanent protection to slavery in the United States of America. That piece of legislation was the first version of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, also known as the Corwin Amendment. In fact, the last piece of legislation that out-going Democrat President James Buchanan endorsed, and the first one that the new Republican President, Abraham Lincoln endorsed was one and the same: the Corwin Amendment. This information is certainly not compatible with the picture we have of Abraham Lincoln today. How could the Great Liberator, the Emancipator of slaves have ever backed such a depraved statute? So should we cancel Abraham Lincoln and the slaveholding founding fathers as demanded by many social justice activists these days, or can we change the way we choose to remember them by including their dark sides, by striving to understand the historical context and moral framework these men lived in and held; thus revisit our national narratives?
    Keywords: The original 13th Amendment, permanent protection to slavery, revisiting heroes and public memorials, national narratives, cancel culture
    JEL: I21 Z00
    Date: 2021–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sek:iefpro:12413359&r=
  11. By: Ingela Alger; Slimane Dridi (Unknown); Jonathan Stieglitz (IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse); Michael Wilson (Unknown)
    Abstract: How did humans evolve from individualistic foraging to collective foraging with sex differences in food production and widespread sharing of plant and animal foods? While current models of food sharing focus on meat or cooking, considerations of the economics of foraging for extracted plant foods (e.g., roots, tubers), inferred to be important for earlier hominins (∼ 6–2.5 mya), suggest that hominins shared such foods. Here we present a conceptual and mathematical model of early hominin food production and sharing, prior to the emergence of frequent scavenging, hunting and cooking. We hypothesize that extracted plant foods were vulnerable to theft, and that male mate-guarding protected females from food theft. We identify conditions favoring plant food production and sharing across mating systems (i.e., monogamy, polygyny, promiscuity), and we assess which mating system maximizes female fitness with changes in the energetic profitability of extractive foraging. Females extract foods and share them with males only when: i) extracting rather than collecting plant foods pays off energetically; and ii) males guard females.
    Date: 2022–05–30
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03681083&r=
  12. By: Moll, Ben
    JEL: N0
    Date: 2020–10–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:107424&r=
  13. By: Christoph Huber; Michael Kirchler
    Abstract: Experiments can complement other methods in identifying causal relationships and in measuring behavioral deviations from theoretical predictions. While the experimental method has long been central in many scientific disciplines, it was almost nonexistent in finance until the 1980s. To survey the development of experiments in finance, we compile a comprehensive account of experimental studies published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Finance, Journal of Quantitative and Financial Analysis, and Journal of Banking and Finance—as well as of experimental finance studies published in the Top 5 journals in economics. With this novel dataset, we identify historical trends in experimental finance. Since the first experiments where published in finance journals in the 1980s, and especially in the last 20 years, the share of experimental publications in these journals has increased strongly. We report trends towards descriptive experiments, individual decision experiments, and field experiments.
    Keywords: Experimental finance, laboratory experiments, field experiments, survey.
    JEL: B41 C90 G00 G41
    Date: 2022–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inn:wpaper:2022-09&r=
  14. By: Kuvshinov, Dmitry; Richter, Björn; Zimmermann, Kaspar
    Abstract: This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are associated with increasingly large output gaps. Before 1945, bank asset returns had no excess predictive power for future economic activity, while after 1945 they have outperformed non-financials as a predictor of GDP. We provide evidence linking this increasing connectedness between banks and the macroeconomy to secular increases in financial and macroeconomic leverage. JEL Classification: G01, G15, G21, E44, N20, O16
    Keywords: banking crises, bank risk, leverage, long-run trends, macro-financial linkages
    Date: 2022–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20222672&r=
  15. By: Stein Berre; Paul Kosmetatos; Asani Sarkar
    Abstract: June 2022 marks the 250th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1772-3 credit crisis. Although not widely known today, this was arguably the first “modern” global financial crisis in terms of the role that private-sector credit and financial products played in it, in the paths of financial contagion that propagated the initial shock, and in the way authorities intervened to stabilize markets. In this post, we describe these developments and note the parallels with modern financial crises.
    Keywords: credit crisis; economic history; global credit
    JEL: G01
    Date: 2022–06–27
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fednls:94395&r=
  16. By: Quoc-Anh Do (Northwestern University [Evanston]); Roberto Galbiati (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Benjamin Marx (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Miguel Serrano (UC3M - Universidad Carlos III de Madrid [Madrid])
    Date: 2020–10–05
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpspec:hal-02957438&r=
  17. By: Marcin Wroński (SGH Warsaw School of Economics)
    Abstract: In 1923 Poland introduced an extraordinary wealth tax. We use the internal statistics of the Ministry of the Treasury to estimate wealth inequality in interwar Poland. This data source has not been previously used by researchers. There are no estimates of wealth inequality in interwar Poland available in the literature. According to our estimates, the top 0.01% of the wealth distribution controlled 16.4% of total private wealth. The wealth share of the top 1% stood at 42.5%. The top decile owned 67.3% of total private wealth. Wealth inequality varied strongly across regions. A comparison of wealth inequality in Poland with wealth inequality in other European countries in the interwar period yields a diverse picture. The wealth share of the top 0.01% was the highest in Europe, the wealth share of the top 1% was in the middle of the European ranking, the wealth share of the top 10% was almost the lowest in Europe. The small elite of super-rich (0.01%) was very wealthy in comparison to the European peers, but the wealth share of the rest of the top decile was relatively low. The unequal development of former partitions may partially explain high very top wealth shares.
    Keywords: wealth distribution,inequality,Poland,interwar
    Date: 2022–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wilwps:halshs-03693208&r=
  18. By: Phenikaa, ISR
    Abstract: Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research | Phenikaa University (by Ho Manh Toan; 27 December 2020. *Original preprint: https://osf.io/jqw4a/) — This short explorative article looks at the list of papers on Vietnam's political economy in the past ten years.
    Date: 2020–12–26
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:8dm96&r=
  19. By: Cyprien Batut (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement); Ulysse Lojkine (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement); Paolo Santini (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)
    Abstract: Is France characterized by a particularly low level of unionization compared to other European countries? This is what the comparative literature on trade unions suggests. In this policy brief, we question this idea and trace a different history of the evolution of the level of unionization in France. Current estimates are based on a double extrapolation of membership data from the two main unions — the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT) — and the results of workplace elections. Based on representative surveys of the French population, including polls and international surveys, we estimate that the level of unionization was underestimated until the late 1970s.
    Date: 2022–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:ipppap:halshs-03693431&r=
  20. By: Azam, Jean-Paul
    Abstract: This paper shows how careful strategic thinking outperforms hasty ethical judgment to produce peace. It uses a provocation model to explain why the initial Muslim coalition against southern Christians broke up in Sudan and Chad thanks to much vilified pipelines. The need to cooperate was made obvious in Sudan when oil flew in a Chinese-built pipeline running through the Christian rebels’ homeland, tilting decisively the balance of power in the latter’s favor. Political Islam was discarded when the rebels proved their ability to disrupt the oil flow by blowing up the pipeline and Jihad was called off. The government of Sudan had switched from African socialism to Political Islam a couple of decades before, imposing the Sharia Law even on the Christians as a provocation to trigger a rebellion and to launch an ethnic-cleansing campaign in the oil-rich areas. The failure of the Western oil companies to build the pipeline and launch extraction, under the pressure of their national civil societies, gave time to the Khartoum government to spread death and devastation in the South. In Chad also, the initial Muslim coalition against the Christians broke up for sharing the oil money with the latter, but with a different timing.
    JEL: N47 N57 L71 P45
    Date: 2022–07–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:127067&r=
  21. By: Florin L. Cucu (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
    Abstract: This thesis studies the determinants of spatial variation and persistence of economic activity. The first chapter assesses the impact of the construction of the Interstate Highway System on the skill composition of metropolitan areas in the USA. Reduced-form estimates indicate that each additional highway caused an increase in the share of college-educated residents of 0.6 percentage points. Using a quantitative spatial model, the chapter also measures the welfare effects associated with a hypothetical removal of the interstate network. The effects are large for all skill groups. Graduates would nonetheless experience bigger losses in terms of welfare as they are more likely to relocate and incur the higher migration costs.The second chapter documents high persistence of regional development in England and Wales over the last 800 years. Using data on the establishment of medieval markets, the study highlights a strong correlation between commercial activity and agricultural productivity in the late Middle Ages. Places with successful medieval markets remain better developed nowadays. The evidence suggests that path dependence is the most likely explanation for the persistence of development over many centuries. The third chapter studies the relationship between asylum policies and international tensions. The main hypothesis is that European Union member states are more likely to admit refugees from states perceived as rivals rather than partners. Data on asylum applications from 1999 to 2017 bear this out. This result can rationalize a negative and robust correlation between asylum recognition rates and EU imports from the rest of the world.
    Abstract: Cette thèse étudie les déterminants de la variation spatiale et de la persistance de l'activité économique. Le premier chapitre évalue l'impact du Système d'Autoroutes Inter-États sur la composition des zones métropolitaines aux États-Unis. Les estimations indiquent que chaque autoroute a entraîné une augmentation de 0,6 point de pourcentage de la part des résidents hautement qualifiés d'une ville. En utilisant un modèle spatial quantitatif, le chapitre mesure également les effets sur le bien-être associés à une suppression hypothétique des autoroutes. Les effets sont significatifs pour toutes les catégories de travailleurs. Les pertes sont néanmoins plus importantes pour les travailleurs qualifiés, vu qu'ils sont plus mobiles et paient les coûts de migration plus souvent.Le deuxième chapitre montre une forte persistance du développement en Angleterre et au Pays de Galles au cours des 800 dernières années. En utilisant des données sur l'établissement des marchés médiévaux, l'étude met en évidence une forte corrélation entre l'activité commerciale et la productivité agricole au Moyen Âge. Les régions avec des marchés prospères sont mieux développées aujourd'hui. Les résultats suggèrent que la dépendance au sentier en est l'explication la plus probable. Le troisième chapitre étudie la relation entre les politiques d'asile et les tensions internationales. L'hypothèse est que les pays de l'Union européenne acceptent davantage de réfugiés provenant d'États perçus comme des rivaux. Des données sur les demandes d'asile de 1999 à 2017 le confirment. Cela pourrait expliquer une corrélation négative entre les politiques d'asile et les importations de l'UE.
    Keywords: Transport infrastructure,Migration,Persistence,Refugees,Infrastructure routière,Persistance,Réfugiés
    Date: 2020–06–22
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpspec:tel-03408590&r=
  22. By: Willman, Paul; Pepper, Alexander
    Abstract: We examine the role of large firms in generating income inequality. Specifically, we consider the growth in the use of asset-based rewards for senior executives, combined with continued use of salaries and wages for other employees, and the impact this has on measures of inequality within firms. Our paper presents data on intra firm inequality from the UK FTSE 100 for the period 2000-2015. It looks at ratios of CEO to average earnings and attempts to explain both the growth in inequality on this measure and the extent of variance between firms. It distinguishes between a period of “administered inequality” up to the early 1980’s when intra-firm processes defined differential pay and a subsequent one of “outsourced inequality”, when capital market measures dominate executive pay. In the latter period, intra firm inequality measures are defined by upward movements in capital market measures and the extent of outsourcing of low paid work. We conclude by discussing a number of UK public policy proposals regarding executive pay.
    Keywords: CEO compensation; firms; inequality; pay ratios; International Inequalities Institute
    JEL: R14 J01
    Date: 2020–12–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:103809&r=
  23. By: Roney, Jack
    Keywords: Crop Production/Industries, Agricultural and Food Policy
    Date: 2021–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:usao21:321008&r=

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