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on Business, Economic and Financial History |
| By: | Daniel Aaronson; Mark Borgschulte; Sunny Liu; Bhashkar Mazumder |
| Abstract: | Does education lead to political activity? We find that a large, early 20th century school construction program, the Rosenwald schools, led to more NAACP branches in the rural South starting in the early 1940s, i.e. prior to the classic U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Branch growth was stronger where Jim Crow occupational segregation prevented Black men from realizing some of the economic gains of their education. Our findings lend support to theories emphasizing that economic context can act as a critical mediator in determining whether human capital causes political engagement. |
| JEL: | I20 J71 N32 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35842 |
| By: | Maxime Merli (LARGE - Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg); Antoine Parent (IXXI - Institut Rhône-Alpin des systèmes complexes - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon - Université de Lyon - INSA - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - Inria - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we unearth a forgotten study of Pierre Des Essars, the director of research at the Banque de France in the late 19th century, enriched with comments from contemporary financial analysts. Des Essars provides the first and only existing example of the actual composition of French individual portfolios during the Belle Époque. By revisiting what is generally taught, our analyses show that many of the intuitions of "finance for normal people" were already present in the financial analysts' writings during the Belle Époque. Specifically, we show in an unprecedented way that these writings prefigure behavioral portfolio theory word for word a century before its emergence. In addition, our findings highlight that this popular science of investment was born from observations of individual portfolios and the objective of providing financial education for the masses. Finally, we reveal strong invariants in the construction of behavioral finance versus standard finance a century apart. |
| Keywords: | N23, N20, G15, G14, behavioral portfolio theory | cognitive psychology | finance for normal people | rationality of individual investors JEL Classification: G11, behavioral portfolio theory | cognitive psychology | finance for normal people | rationality of individual investors JEL Classification: G11 G14 G15 N20 N23 |
| Date: | 2025–01–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05775271 |
| By: | Thomas Delcey (LEDi - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dijon [Dijon] - UBE - Université Bourgogne Europe); Aurélien Goutsmedt (ICHEC - Brussels Management School [Bruxelles], UCLouvain - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain); Alexandre Truc (GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion - UNS - Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (1965 - 2019) - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur) |
| Abstract: | This article demonstrates how unsupervised quantitative methods can enrich the history of economic thought. Using the largest English-language corpus ever assembled for the field—nearly 260, 000 economics journal articles from 1900 to 2009 with citation data—we analyze the evolution of the concept of rationality. Combining large language model–based semantic analysis with bibliometric and network methods, we identify and cluster discussions of rationality across time and scales, such as the emergence of a social view of rationality, the circulation of bounded rationality, and the emergence of behavioral economics. We provide an open-source interactive tool to support transparency and reuse. |
| Keywords: | Text mining, large language models, natural language processing, behavioral economics, bibliometrics, economics history, Bounded rationality, rationality |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05431080 |
| By: | Ran Abramitzky; Jacob Conway; Roy Mill; Luke C. D. Stein |
| Abstract: | We study differences in economic outcomes by perceived skin tone among African Americans using full-count U.S. decennial census data from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Comparing children coded as "Black" or "Mulatto" by census enumerators and linking these children across population censuses, we first document large gaps in educational attainment and income among African Americans with darker and lighter perceived skin tones. To disentangle the drivers of these gaps, we identify all 35, 992 families in which enumerators assigned same-gender siblings different Black/Mulatto classifications. Relative to sisters coded as Mulatto, sisters coded as Black had lower educational attainment, were less likely to marry, and had less-educated, likely lower-earning husbands. These patterns are consistent with more severe contemporaneous discrimination against African American women with darker perceived skin tones. In contrast, we find similar educational attainment, marital outcomes, and incomes among differently-classified brothers. Men perceived as African Americans of any skin tone faced similar contemporaneous discrimination, consistent with the "one-drop" racial classification rule that grouped together individuals with any known Black ancestry. Lower incomes for African American men perceived as having darker skin tone in the general population were driven by differences in opportunities and resources that varied across families, likely reflecting the impacts of historical or family-level discrimination. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.10606 |
| By: | Horrell, Sara; Humphries, Jane |
| Abstract: | Economic historians often attribute better health and hygiene in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to improved domestic conditions, enabled by sanitary reform and the education of working-class women in household management. Instruction might have engendered a new esteem for cleanliness and comfort or greater awareness of the mechanisms of disease transmission, but it remains unclear how ordinary women translated the responsibility for their families’ health into improved domestic conditions. We examine the circumstances in which most women toiled to achieve the standards decreed. Despite the much-lauded sanitary reforms of the era, environments were challenging. Increased urbanisation, population growth, and over-crowded accommodation put demands on public provision of the clean water and sanitation essential to alleviate domestic squalor. Housing remained primitive and household budgets inadequate. Mothers laboured to launder their families’ clothes, to keep their children clean, and to create palatable meals with the meanest of resources. But sanitary infrastructure stopped outside working-class homes, water was supplied to external standpipes, and disposed of by hand into street drains, while flush toilets were few and far between forcing reliance on shared and filthy privy middens often located at some distance. Labour-saving appliances were uncommon, and nutritional adequacy hard to achieve on working-class incomes. Reformers thought that poor domestic sanitation, slum housing, overcrowding, and poverty should be remedied by private initiative not public intervention. Women heard the exhortations to protect their families from dearth, dirt, and disease, but it was only by dint of their own toil that they could compensate for the limitations that their circumstances imposed and begin to address the gulf between reality and public expectations. |
| Keywords: | housework;hygiene;health;twentieth century England |
| JEL: | R14 J01 |
| Date: | 2026–10–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:140928 |
| By: | Jon D. Wisman |
| Abstract: | It is commonplace for contemporary American politicians to characterize as ideal the values prevalent during the early US Republic, ignoring that many critical socio-economic conditions that undergirded those values longer ago ceased to exist. Those conditions were radically altered during post-Civil War industrialization as increasing members of American society lacked independent status as owners in control of the resources and tools with which they worked. They were forced to work for others, suffer the humiliation of being bossed about, and the threat of unemployment. This degrading of work weakened democratic values, eroded community, transformed the household, and gave rise to the consumer culture that so irked Thorstein Veblen. This article, after examining the nature of work in pre-industrial America, addresses the subsequent process of proletarianization. It then details how the debasement of work transformed political values, weakened communities, altered the household, and steered worker families to increasingly seek status through consumption rather than through work and community, thereby eventually threatening environmental devastation. The final section addresses how two reforms – guaranteeing employment at living wages with reskilling where necessary and implementing measures to extend freedom and democracy into the workplace – could enable the U.S. to recapture the security, worker freedom, and community that pre-dated industrialization. These reforms are necessary for preserving democracy and avoiding ecological Armageddon. The political feasibility of these two reforms is that they would preserve capitalism, retaining its two most fundamental social institutions of private property and markets, albeit without exploitation and degraded work. |
| Keywords: | Debased labor, political values, guaranteed employment, workplace democracy. |
| JEL: | E21 E44 G01 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:2026-01 |
| By: | Johann Caro-Burnett; Sebastian Galiani; Gustavo Torrens |
| Abstract: | Why do rising powers survive periods in which established states can still suppress them? Existing theories of preventive war emphasize commitment problems between declining and rising states, which can make adverse power shifts especially dangerous. We show that commitment problems among established rivals can have the opposite effect. Preventive action against a rising power can alter the incumbent’s relationship with another state. Under opportunistic rivalry, prevention temporarily exposes the incumbent to exploitation by an existing rival. Under defensive rivalry, successful prevention strengthens the incumbent by eliminating a potential counterweight, giving its rival an incentive to protect the rising state. In both cases, third-party responses can deter preventive action that would occur in an otherwise identical dyadic setting. Cooperation among established powers can reverse this result when credible arrangements allow them to manage the strategic consequences of suppression. Historical evidence from the American Revolution, China’s nuclear emergence, and U.S.–Soviet bargaining over West German nuclear capabilities illustrates the mechanisms and their limits. The analysis shows how rivalry among established powers can protect vulnerable rising states and thereby facilitate changes in the international distribution of power. |
| JEL: | P0 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35862 |
| By: | Max Deter; Kalle Kappner; Hans Lueders |
| Abstract: | Does repression silence dissent or push people to leave? We study the arrest of protesters during East Germany's Peaceful Revolution, using novel micro-data from Leipzig. Residents of streets and houses with an arrested protester were more likely to have left their address once the Berlin Wall fell, and exit visa applications rose in the months after an arrest. Nearby protest activity and support for the opposition show no visible decline after an arrest. Our results suggest that repression raised the demand for exit without a visible retreat of voice, and that residents acted on this demand once leaving became possible. |
| Keywords: | protest, repression, emigration, exit visas, East Germany, autocratic breakdown |
| JEL: | H10 N44 P20 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13036 |
| By: | Adam Guren |
| Abstract: | What caused the 2000s housing cycle? This article synthesizes two decades of research, including reduced-form empirics and structural models. Although often contentious, the literature coheres once one accounts for each study’s timing, place, methodology, and measurement. The cycle was a perfect storm that occurred in distinct stages. Starting in the late 1990s, fundamentals improved, and credit supply increased across the income distribution due to automated underwriting and financial deregulation. In the early 2000s, a decline in interest rates was followed by a further expansion in securitized and subprime credit, the origin of which remains controversial. This sequence of shocks produced a persistent boom that triggered two shifts in beliefs: average expectations became overly optimistic, pushing prices higher, and expectations diverged, fueling speculation. In the bust, prices overshot primarily due to mortgage defaults, which removed buyers and contracted credit supply. How these forces interact and how expectations form require further research. |
| JEL: | E32 G21 R21 R31 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35863 |
| By: | Atkins, Jon |
| Abstract: | Urban street design plays a critical role in safety, mobility, community and public welfare. Yet, systematic, large analysis of streetscape change remains challenging due to the scale, heterogeneity and unstructured nature of publicly available data. We here introduce StreetTransformer, a unified, open-source, multi-modal visual analytics system and framework for gathering, comparing, retrieving and analyzing urban streetscape state and change over time. We construct a novel spatiotemporally grounded corpus for New York City’s more than 47, 000 intersections by integrating longitudinal aerial imagery, segmentation masks, civic design documents and capital reconstruction project data spanning nearly two decades of New York City history. Innovatively, this corpus includes a large cache of 33, 000 unstructured pdf document pages scraped from the NYC DOT website, which have been parsed, categorized and spatially linked to intersections using OCR and LLM-integrations. Additionally, project metadata, collected from NYC Open Data, is standardized and filtered to safety-focused interventions, grounding the Documents, Images and Masks with the city’s objective records. |
| Keywords: | Social and Behavioral Sciences |
| Date: | 2025–12–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt1bw139gk |
| By: | Ulugbek Aminjonov (Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU), Trier University); Olivier Bargain (Bordeaux University) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how combinations of ancestral cultural norms are associated with women’s empowerment across ethnic groups worldwide. Linking Demographic and Health Surveys to ancestral traits from the Ethnographic Atlas, we develop a hybrid supervised– unsupervised approach combining Partial Least Squares with k-means clustering to identify multidimensional normative configurations. We identify five probabilistic regimes spanning the empowerment gradient. Severe disempowerment is associated with an accumulation of restrictive norms, while religious norms and women’s role in agriculture distinguish higherempowerment environments within otherwise broadly patriarchal configurations. Further up the gradient, contrasts concern first hierarchical social institutions, then kinship structures and the loosening of patriarchal arrangements, before less traditional, more gender-neutral configurations become widespread at the highest levels of empowerment. The salience of norms varies with the configurations in which they are embedded, revealing strongly non-monotonic patterns. These findings remain robust to accounting for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to a range of sensitivity checks. Overall, the analysis provides a global mapping of ancestral normative environments associated with women’s agency and helps identify the configurations most closely related to severe intrahousehold inequality. |
| Keywords: | women’s empowerment, ancestral norms, cultural persistence, kinship systems, machine learning, gender inequality, DHS, Ethnographic Atlas |
| JEL: | J16 O15 Z13 C38 D13 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iaa:dpaper:202607 |
| By: | Carballido Cerqueiro, María; Carro, Jesús M.; Siotis, Georgios |
| Abstract: | This paper aims to better understand competitive rivalry in the US airline industry over the last 25 years. First, it contributes to a better understanding of the procompetitive "Southwest effect" over the period 2000-2025. We show that this effect can clearly be identified during the first part of our sample period, but disappears circa 2016, when Southwest culminated a process of strategic re-orientation and appears to have started behaving like legacy carriers. Second, we find that Southwest presence on a route flattened the relationship between air fares and Multimarket Contact (MMC) until the mid-2010s; since then, the two groups of routes have converged. Third, we document that the effect of MMC on fares has diminished over time. We conjecture that this may be due to increased concentration and symmetry among major players. Fourth, our results indicate that a linear specificationto identify the relationship between MMC and fares may be adequate until2007. This is no longer the case afterwards: the data point to a non-monotonic U/V-like shape, first on routes with Southwest and, from 2016, on all routes. Fifth, the pandemic seems to have led to a temporary breakdown in tacit collusion, but only on routes where Southwest was not present; once the COVID-19 crisis ended, the long-run evolution of the MMC-fare relationship resumed. |
| Keywords: | Southwest effect; Multimarket contact; Airline industry; Demand shock; Pandemic |
| Date: | 2026–10–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:50949 |
| By: | Richard B. Freeman; Danxia Xie; Hanzhe Zhang; Hanzhang Zhou |
| Abstract: | We analyze the academic affiliations of nearly 6, 000 award-winning researchers in 18 major fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences from the 1820s to the 2020s, focusing on the 1960s onward. The analysis reveals a trend of declining concentration in the institutional affiliations of award-winning researchers, shifting from a few science-strong universities in high-income countries to a more diverse set of institutions across the world. The decline in concentration is observed in all fields except one: economics. The institutional affiliations of prizewinning economists have become more concentrated over time, making economics the most concentrated field. We associate the higher concentration of prizewinning work in economics with the field’s stronger sorting by institutional prestige, its lower reliance on specialized equipment and instruments, and its assessment of findings based on a synthesis of evidence rather than on decisive experiments or proofs. We discuss the benefits and costs of this high and rising institutional concentration of prizewinning economists. |
| JEL: | A11 A12 A14 I23 J44 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35875 |
| By: | Paula Johanna Rodríguez Badillo |
| Abstract: | Female ex-combatants face numerous barriers to achieving financial independence and reintegrating into the labor market. These barriers are often linked to gender roles that force them to take on caregiving responsibilities that they were not xpected to perform within armed groups. As a result, ex-combatants face labor discrimination and a gap in their work xperience due to caregiving responsibilities, which can discourage them from participating in productive projects or job searches. |
| Keywords: | Ex-combatants; Empowerment; Gender Roles; and Economic Reintegration |
| JEL: | J16 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000176:023687 |
| By: | Eric Vansteenberghe |
| Abstract: | Two coefficients enter nearly every quantitative argument about monetary policy: the Phillips-curve slope and the policy rule's response to inflation. For seventy years, each generation that estimated them identified the coefficient conditional on assumptions it maintained, and its successor relaxed one of them, naming the bias this exposed. This survey reconstructs the two programs as a single identification problem. It distinguishes five senses in which a coefficient has been called identified, reads each generation of the curve and of the rule in that key, and shows that the programs fail together because each borrows its identifying condition from the other. The same sequence ran on the latent inflation target and on the optimal rule. The survey closes on what the credible designs license when they leave a range rather than a point: bounds, signs and orderings, and decisions designed for a range. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.06007 |