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on Business, Economic and Financial History |
| By: | Erik Bengtsson (Lund University); Jakob Molinder (Uppsala University); Svante Prado (University of Gothenburg) |
| Abstract: | We study the relationship between the structural transformation of the economy and the income distribution, focusing on the case of Sweden from 1870 to 1970, with extra attention paid to the 1870–1950 period, for which we produce extensive new data. Average income increased fivefold between 1870 and 1950, and the share employed in agriculture declined from 72 to 23 per cent. To study the evolution of the income distribution, we collected new data, including 232, 000 individual income tax returns, 13, 000 property tax returns, and a rich set of complementary sources. Using these micro data, we calculate Gini coefficients, top income shares, capital shares, skill premia, and occupation- and gender-specific income levels and ratios, providing new evidence on the long-run evolution of income and inequality. Our income data and decomposition analyses demonstrate that the movement out of agriculture, which was a severely unequal sector in Sweden in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounts for much of the decline in income inequality, together with the expansion of more productive jobs in manufacturing and offices. This process was aided by the migration of labour out of agriculture, as well as by educational and other policies that facilitated structural transformation. Focusing on structural transformation can help explain two paradoxes in the literature on twentieth century income inequality: that much equalisation occurred before the growth of the welfare state, and that non-belligerents in the World Wars, like Sweden, saw similar levels of equalisation as belligerent countries. |
| Keywords: | incomes, inequality, Sweden, structural transformation, economic history |
| JEL: | D31 J30 N30 O52 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0305 |
| By: | MacLachlan, Anne J |
| Keywords: | Arts and Humanities |
| Date: | 2026–05–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt723521rd |
| By: | Smith, Rose Joy |
| Abstract: | This article explores how urban tourism in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw curates, presents, and contextualises the communist past through depictions of everyday life in museums and walking tours. Utilising the framework of slow memory, the research shifts analytical attention from “eventful” and “sited” historical ruptures to the “non-event” nature of mundane routines and domestic objects. The study argues that these ordinary facets of life function as sedimented memories, gradually accruing through daily practice and shaping contemporary urban identities in ways that monumental history often overlooks. The analysis contrasts two distinct modes of memory representation: (1) museums, which provide structured, artefact-centric narratives that often frame history through institutionalised “routing points, ” and (2) walking tours, which offer mobile, experiential engagements that transform the city itself into a living museum. Through a comparative qualitative study of sites, namely the Budapest Retro Interactive Museum, Prague’s Museum of Communism, and Warsaw’s Life Under Communism Museum, the research highlights a persistent tension between commercialised “retro-nostalgia” and critical, sustained reflection. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how these diverse tourism modalities navigate the boundaries between remembrance and commodification, revealing that the residues of the communist era remain deeply embedded in the social and architectural fabric of modern European capitals. By foregrounding the “ordinary” within historical discourse, the research provides a framework for understanding urban identity as a process of quiet sustenance, where history is integrated into the very texture of contemporary life. |
| Date: | 2026–05–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:du8hr_v1 |
| By: | Roy, Tirthankar |
| Abstract: | This paper examines Harrisons and Crosfield’s Quilon operations in interwar South India to highlight the role of site-specificity in shaping global firms. Unlike most British companies headquartered in major colonial port cities, Harrisons and Crosfield established its Indian base in Quilon, a small town with strategic access to estates and backwaters but limited infrastructure. Situating the case within debates on multinational enterprise and colonial business, the paper argues that geography and foreignness were central to the firm’s longevity, shaping both opportunities and limits to expansion. |
| Keywords: | Harrisons and Crosfield; multilocational firms; site-specificity; Travancore; British business in Asia |
| JEL: | N0 |
| Date: | 2026–05–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:137960 |
| By: | Madison K. Arnsbarger; Andreas Ferrara; Paige Montrose |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the role of economic participation via the labor market in enabling the political mobilization of an underrepresented group. Specifically, we study the wives and daughters of disabled Union Army soldiers after the U.S. Civil War. Linking Union Army enlistment records to the 1860 and 1870 U.S. censuses, we find that the wives and daughters of disabled veterans were significantly more likely to participate in the labor force than those of non-disabled veterans. Historical evidence suggests that disabled veterans were also more exposed to postwar alcohol and substance abuse, increasing the household burdens faced by women. Town-level data show that increases in women's labor force participation combined with higher shares of disabled veterans predict more Temperance Crusade activity in 1873-74. Information provision via newspapers and proximity to other protest towns amplify these effects. Using unit-level disability rates as an instrument for veterans' disability status supports a causal interpretation of the labor market effects. Our results suggest that labor force participation can be an important enabling factor for the political mobilization of underrepresented groups. |
| JEL: | D72 J15 J18 N31 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35287 |
| By: | Bhattarai, Keshav; Adhikari, Ambika P. (Institute for Integrated Development Studies (IIDS)) |
| Abstract: | The Sukumbasi question in Nepal must be understood as a historically layered problem of inequality, social displacement, legal ambiguity, and unstable state intervention, rather than a narrow or recent problem of informal settlement. Much of the policy discourse has treated Sukumbasi as an issue related to encroachment, unauthorized occupation, or land administration problem. Such a framing is analytically insufficient. The historical record suggests that the problem emerged through a lengthy process in which landlessness was first embedded within older systems of dependency, then made visible through the abolition of slavery, later managed through settlement and resettlement schemes, and eventually formalized through commissions, legal definitions, and statutory categories. Across successive political regimes, the Nepali state repeatedly acknowledged the problems of landlessness and created mechanisms to address it. Yet these interventions rarely matured into durable solutions. (De Schutter, 2021). The central argument of this historical review is that the Sukumbasi question in Nepal is not best explained by policy absence, but by the proliferation of public agencies without institutional continuity. The state has repeatedly identified the landless, classified them, collected applications for land allocation, and announced redistributive or regularizing measures. However, commissions have been short-lived, legal categories of Sukumbasi have shifted in scope, implementation has been interrupted, and institutional memory has repeatedly been fractured. Consequently, the history of the Sukumbasi issue is less a story of the invisibility of the settlers than one of repeated recognition followed by recurring suspension (De Schutter, 2021). |
| Date: | 2026–05–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:njcs5_v1 |
| By: | Bellani, Luna (Ulm University); Hager, Anselm (Humboldt University Berlin); Maurer, Stephan (UPF Barcelona School of Management) |
| Abstract: | Did Southern elites’ economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave-owning and two Northern states (1850–1880), we document a striking paradox: despite the massive wealth shock of emancipation, the political influence of former slave owners increased during Reconstruction and its aftermath. We show that former slave owners won office at similar rates as in the antebellum period and secured more committee assignments. Comparable patterns are not visible among wealthy legislators in Northern comparison states. This suggests that Southern elites responded to economic loss by tightening their grip on formal political institutions. Our findings point to formal political institutions as one channel through which defeated economic elites preserved influence during Reconstruction and its aftermath. |
| Keywords: | wealth inequality, elites and development, US South, slavery, political power, reconstruction |
| JEL: | D72 J62 N31 N41 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18650 |
| By: | MacLachlan, Anne J |
| Keywords: | Arts and Humanities |
| Date: | 2026–05–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt8hn867wr |
| By: | Kristina Butaeva; Steven N. Durlauf; Alexander Shapoval |
| Abstract: | This paper examines intergenerational mobility across social classes during the late Qing dynasty employing a remarkable data set from Liaoning province in Northeast China. We identify two distinct epochs with markedly different mobility dynamics. Before 1850, mobility patterns exhibited stability and convergence toward a steady state. The second epoch, beginning around 1850, was characterized by unstable intergenerational class dynamics that persisted until the dynasty’s collapse. The transition between epochs coincides with the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion, demonstrating how the footprints of major crises in the late Qing era can be traced in mobility dynamics. Employing Markov-chain measures and two alternative mobility concepts—the persistence of class origin across generations and intergenerational class movement—we document that intergenerational mobility increased over the period. However, this aggregate increase masked a decline in upward mobility alongside a rise in downward mobility—disparate patterns that resonate with broader theories of political instability. |
| JEL: | J62 N35 N95 O1 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35313 |
| By: | MacLachlan, Anne J |
| Keywords: | Arts and Humanities |
| Date: | 2026–05–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt9vw327nz |
| By: | MacLachlan, Anne J |
| Keywords: | Arts and Humanities |
| Date: | 2026–05–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt3jk8p6cq |
| By: | MacLachlan, Anne J |
| Keywords: | Arts and Humanities |
| Date: | 2026–05–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt79m4759w |
| By: | Arnsbarger, Madison (Weber State University); Ferrara, Andreas (University of Pittsburgh); Montrose, Paige (University of Pittsburgh) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the role of economic participation via the labour market in enabling the political mobilization of an underrepresented group. Specifically, we study the wives and daughters of disabled Union Army soldiers after the U.S. Civil War. Linking Union Army enlistment records to the 1860 and 1870 U.S. censuses, we find that the wives and daughters of disabled veterans were significantly more likely to participate in the labour force than those of non-disabled veterans. Historical evidence suggests that disabled veterans were also more exposed to post-war alcohol and substance abuse, increasing the household burdens faced by women. Town-level data show that increases in women’s labour force participation combined with higher shares of disabled veterans predict more Temperance Crusade activity in 1873–74. Information provision via newspapers and proximity to other protest towns amplify these effects. Using unit-level disability rates as an instrument for veterans’ disability status supports a causal interpretation of the labour market effects. Our results suggest that labour force participation can be an important enabling factor for the political mobilization of underrepresented groups. |
| Keywords: | U.S. Civil War, Female Labor Force Participation, Temperance, Political Activism JEL Classification: N31, J15, J18, D72 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:807 |
| By: | Giovanni Mellace; Rok Spruk |
| Abstract: | We estimate long-run effects of Cuba's 1961 National Health Service and contemporaneous National Literacy Campaign using synthetic-control methods on newly assembled series for 21 former European colonies in the Americas, 1900--2022. Relative to synthetic Cuba, infant mortality falls 15--29 percent and average years of schooling rise 1.5--2 years; both effects are large, persistent, and robust to augmented SCM, synthetic difference-in-differences, interactive fixed effects, and matrix completion. Life-expectancy gains attenuate after 1990, consistent with the post-Soviet Special Period, suggesting that bundled health and literacy reforms permanently raise early-life survival and human capital, with smaller and less robust effects on adult longevity. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.29785 |
| By: | Smith, Rose Joy; Vas, Andreea Elle |
| Abstract: | This article examines how the afterlives of state socialism are made legible in contexts where the everyday past is only partially documented, materially fragmented, or absent from visual archives. Focusing on childhood memories of communist Romania in the 1980s and their remediation in post-socialist museum spaces in Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw, it argues that the legibility of this past does not depend primarily on the recovery of missing images or the reconstruction of singular historical events, but on the curatorial reactivation of rhythms of everyday life. |
| Date: | 2026–05–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:czrxg_v1 |
| By: | MacLachlan, Anne J |
| Keywords: | Arts and Humanities |
| Date: | 2026–05–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt2zt7d1k8 |
| By: | Carol-Anne Loher-Delalune (GRANEM - Groupe de Recherche Angevin en Economie et Management - UA - Université d'Angers - Institut Agro Rennes Angers - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement) |
| Abstract: | Teaching the history of accounting and finance often faces two primary challenges: • A lack of dedicated curriculum time: historical perspectives are frequently side-lined in favour of technical content. • A student perception of irrelevance: learners struggle to connect historical milestones with contemporary professional practice. To address these hurdles, this project introduces two interconnected yet independent tools: a physical Timeline Card Game and a YouTube podcast series—forming a coherent "phygital" approach to curriculum enrichment. |
| Date: | 2026–05–20 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05629627 |
| By: | water, spring |
| Abstract: | This paper establishes the theoretical framework of the School of Legal-Economic Isomorphism, arguing that law and economy exist not in a relationship of mutual influence, but in an isomorphic relationship of definition and being defined. Drawing on comparative historical analysis spanning from the Code of Hammurabi and Fuxi’s trigrams to the Roosevelt New Deal, the study distills three sub-laws of civilizational evolution: the Law of Productivity Step-Functions, the Law of Legal Reconstruction, and the Law of Alignment Synchronization. It diagnoses the persistent global economic stagnation of the past two decades as a “Temporal Misalignment” between industrial-age legal frameworks and digital-age productive forces. The paper introduces core analytical concepts—Digital Public Infrastructure, Digital Easement, Digital Rent, and Rentier Capitalism—to demonstrate that large digital platforms function not as private stores but as digital land extracting feudal-like rents. The study proposes a constitutional-level institutional engineering program for the digital age, including the publicization of platforms, the prohibition of digital rent, and the establishment of data public ownership, while critically transcending existing schools of Law and Economics, Institutional Economics, and Marxist Political Economy. |
| Keywords: | Legal-Economic Isomorphism; Constitutional Reconstruction; Digital Public Infrastructure; Digital Rent; Platform Economy; Temporal Misalignment; Rentier Capitalism; Institutional Engineering; Law and Economics |
| JEL: | K0 K1 K2 |
| Date: | 2026–05–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129198 |
| By: | spring, water |
| Abstract: | This article advances a foundational jurisprudential proposition bearing upon the survival of human civilization: substantive justice is the source and telos of procedural justice; procedural justice is the instrument and means of substantive justice. Through a comparative legal history of civilizational collapse—from the Qin Code and Roman law to the French Ancien Régime and contemporary American institutional crises—the article demonstrates that the demise of states is not accidental but the cumulative consequence of procedural justice rigidifying and severing itself from the evolving demands of substantive justice. The article introduces a “quadruple pathology” framework (cumulative effect, legitimacy depletion, feedback failure, spillover and cascade) to mechanistically analyze this divergence, and proposes an actionable institutional design—comprising the Independent Fact-Finding and Investigation Committee (IFIC), the Independent Audit and Supervision Bureau (IASB), and the Global Correction and Recovery Fund (GCRF)—to establish perpetual self-calibration mechanisms within legal systems. The thesis is universal: any intelligent civilization that fails to equip its procedural systems with the capacity to perceive and correct their divergence from substantive justice will accumulate contradictions until systemic collapse. |
| Keywords: | Procedural Justice; Substantive Justice; Legal Evolution; Isomorphic Co-Evolution; Civilizational Collapse; Radbruch Formula; Institutional Calibration; Sunset Clause; Law & Economics; Comparative Legal History; Feedback Failure; Legitimacy Depletion |
| JEL: | K1 K10 K40 K42 |
| Date: | 2026–05–17 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129201 |
| By: | Qiu, Xincheng; Yoshida, Masahiro |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of climate change on the labor share. Combining newly constructed US county-industry-level labor shares with climate variables, we find that extreme temperatures reduce the labor share, with stronger effects in industries with higher climate exposure and automation potential. Extreme temperatures also accelerate robot adoption. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the within-county-industry response to climate change accounts for 15% of the decline in labor share since 2000. Over the 20th century, however, the opposing effects of decreased cold days and increased hot days offset each other, consistent with the historical stability of labor share. |
| Keywords: | climate change, labor share, automation |
| JEL: | E25 Q54 O33 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1764 |
| By: | Vicente Esteve (Universidad de Valencia, Spain); Nicola Rubino (Universidad de Valencia, Spain) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the long-run dynamics and sustainability of the Italian public debt-to-GDP ratio from 1861 to 2024. To address the presence of non-stationary volatility, we employ the recently de- veloped Time-Transformed Test methodology proposed by Kurozumi, Skorobotov, and Tsarev (2023). By utilizing the cumulative variance profile this approach homogenizes volatility across the time domain, en- suring the asymptotic validity of the STADF and GSTADF statistics and overcoming the size distortions inherent in standard recursive unit root tests. Our empirical findings confirm multiple explosive íbubbleí episodes in Italyís fiscal history, specifically identifying three critical periods of exuberance: the 1913 anticipatory wartime shock, the 1978-1998 structural imbalance, and the 2020 exogenous pandemic-induced spike. While the 1978-1998 episode represents a unique two-decade era of structural divergence sustained by high private savings and debt monetization, the 2020 episode is identified as a temporary yet sig- nificant systemic shock. The study demonstrates that accounting for the evolution of the variance profile is imperative for a reliable fiscal analysis, offering an early-warning benchmark for monitoring modern debt-stabilization rules and evaluating Italyís current fiscal resilience amidst rising debt projections for 2025-2026. |
| Keywords: | Public Debt Sustainability, Explosive Bubbles, Time-Varying Volatility, GSADF, Italian Economy, Variance Profile |
| JEL: | C12 C22 E62 H62 H63 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eec:wpaper:2610 |
| By: | Bautista Santamarina (FCE-UNLP); Matías Ciaschi (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP & CONICET); Mariana Marchionni (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP & CONICET) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and populist attitudes in Latin America, a region characterized by low levels of intergenerational mobility and a long-standing presence of populist leadership. In contexts where social origin strongly predicts individual outcomes, perceptions of unfairness may create fertile ground for populist narratives. Using harmonized microdata from 18 waves of the Latinobarómetro survey covering individuals born between 1940 and 2000, we document a robust negative association between intergenerational mobility and populist attitudes across multiple indicators, including anti-democratic attitudes, support for military governments, anti-immigrant sentiments, and institutional distrust. These results hold when using a relative mobility measure that captures pure positional change net of structural trends, and at the cohort level when exploiting standard mobility measures from the literature. Cohort-level estimates further reveal that the effect of persistence is amplified in high-inequality contexts, suggesting that immobility and contemporaneous inequality act as complements in shaping political discontent. Decomposing inequality into opportunity and effort components, we find evidence suggesting that populist attitudes are mostly driven by inequalities of opportunity. These findings suggest that the persistent emergence of populist leadership in Latin America is linked to the region’s stubbornly low intergenerational mobility and unequal access to opportunities. |
| JEL: | D72 I24 I25 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0374 |
| By: | Allan K. Watanabe Tabuti; Danielle Guizzo; Sebastiao Neto Ribeiro Guedes |
| Abstract: | This paper develops a theoretical and empirical account on the relationship between economic organizations and the production of subjectivities in labor relations. Drawing on John R. Commons’s institutional concept of transactions and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power, it argues that managerial transactions function as disciplinary apparatuses that actively constitute productive and subordinated subjects, reframing labor contracts as technologies of subjectivation. Empirically, we examine the transformation of labor relations in Brazil’s sugarcane agroindustry between 1930 and 1990, focusing on the colonato system and its transition to wage labor (boia-fria). Through a Foucauldian-Institutionalist lens, we show how the colonato’s managerial transactions reveal how they functioned as disciplinary devices grounded in spatial dependence, debt, and paternalistic control. The shift to wage labor did not dismantle these mechanisms, but reconfigured them, displacing spatial and paternalistic subjection with individualized performance control and competitive evaluation. |
| Date: | 2026–01–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bri:uobdis:26/828 |
| By: | Lovo, Rodolfo |
| Abstract: | This paper proposes a structural interpretation of economic power based on the articulation between money, record-keeping, and economic capacity, in continuity with the conception of the Market as a natural institution defined by the interaction of Money, Competition, and Trade. Moving beyond functional definitions of money as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value, the analysis conceptualizes money as a system-dependent representation of economic capacity, whose operational validity depends on mechanisms of record and recognition. From this perspective, economic capacity does not acquire structural relevance unless it is recorded, validated, and made persistent within a system. Record-keeping is therefore not a secondary or administrative feature, but a constitutive mechanism that enables the identification, validation, and accumulation of economic capacity. The paper advances the hypothesis that economic power emerges from the structural articulation between money and record-keeping, through which dispersed capacity becomes traceable, accumulable, and systemically recognized. A historical-evolutionary perspective suggests that transformations in record-keeping constitute a central axis of economic development. In this context, inequality is interpreted as a dynamic structural outcome of accumulation processes embedded within systems of validation. The framework further suggests that expansions in record-keeping and validation mechanisms may operate as structurally equivalent forms of economic expansion, functionally analogous—but not reducible—to monetary issuance. This perspective provides a basis for reinterpreting inflation as a phenomenon linked not only to changes in money supply, but also to transformations in the systems that define and validate economic capacity. |
| Keywords: | Market as a natural institution; Money; Record-keeping; Economic capacity; Economic power; Structural inequality; Monetary theory |
| JEL: | B41 D02 D63 E42 |
| Date: | 2026–05–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:128998 |
| By: | Weber, Jeremy; McCoy, Shawn; Black, Katie Jo; Harleman, Max |
| Abstract: | Can turning an environmental hazard into an amenity help sustain communities facing industrial and population decline? We study Pennsylvania coal communities over three decades, estimating how mine-impaired waterways and their restoration affected population growth as mining and manufacturing declined regionally. We find that communities with mine-impaired waterways and no restoration had 4 percentage points less population growth than similar nearby communities, leading to depopulation for many. Even partial restoration offset this effect, with growth driven by college-educated individuals and those age 65 and older. The presence of mine water treatment systems, usually a series of wetlands and ponds, did not affect population growth apart from effects on water quality. In the face of major economic transitions, environmental restoration can help communities retain and attract residents, thereby advancing the goals of traditional place-based economic development incentives. |
| Keywords: | Mine Drainage; Amenities, Population, Coal, Pollution Mitigation |
| JEL: | O13 Q52 Q56 |
| Date: | 2026–05–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129168 |
| By: | Arizmendi, Luis-Felipe |
| Abstract: | This paper presents a comprehensive synthesis of the contributions recognized by the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel during the decade 2010–2019. This period marks a critical evolution in economic thought, transitioning from abstract general equilibrium modeling to rigorous empirical identification, behavioral integration, and the explicit modeling of market frictions. We systematically analyze the mathematical microstructures of the awarded theories—including Search and Matching Theory (2010), Empirical Macroeconomics (2011), Market Design (2012), Asset Pricing (2013), Regulation (2014), Consumption Analysis (2015), Contract Theory (2016), Behavioral Economics (2017), Climate and Endogenous Growth (2018), and Experimental Development Economics (2019). Special attention is paid to the policy applications of these frameworks in contemporary governance. |
| Keywords: | Search Frictions, Causal Inference, Market Design, Behavioral Finance, Climate Change, Contract Theory |
| JEL: | B22 C50 E00 G12 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–03–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129056 |
| By: | Opeyemi Afolabi Femi-Oladunni (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Universidad Europea de Madrid; Universidad Pontificia Comillas) |
| Abstract: | This article reconceptualises literacy as a household resource rather than an individual endowment, using linked census and fiscal microdata from rural Spain (1906–1920) to estimate its returns for illiterate co-residents and test whether the economic boom induced literacy adoption. Findings revealed that co-residing with a literate household member raised illiterate individuals' income by 1.2 percent in the pooled sample and 2.1 percent during the Vineyard Boom, with women gaining up to 4 percent compared with 2 percent for men. Wealth effects were absent or negative, and illiterate members' income and wealth shares fell by 3 and 6–9 percentage points respectively, revealing that literate members captured a disproportionate share of the gains. Farm households, where spillover returns were highest, increased literacy adoption by 12.7 percentage points by 1920 in response to the boom. The household emerges as the arena in which literacy's benefits are both generated and contested. |
| Keywords: | Literacy spillovers, Rural Spain, Human capital, Rural Households |
| JEL: | N33 J24 D13 I24 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0304 |
| By: | MacLachlan, Anne J |
| Keywords: | Education |
| Date: | 2026–05–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt77s4h952 |
| By: | João Tovar Jalles |
| Abstract: | This paper reassesses the institutional interpretation of Portuguese inequality dynamics advanced by Alcobia and Leal (2026), who argue that declining union density and labour-market liberalisation were the principal drivers of rising top-income concentration in Portugal between 1980 and 2023. Using replication exercises, alternative institutional measures, narrative reform indicators, rolling regressions, structuralbreak diagnostics, VARs, local projections and comparative OECD panel evidence, the paper evaluates the robustness and causal interpretation of the original framework. The results show that the estimated institutional relationships are highly sensitive to specification choice, institutional measurement, sample composition and crisis-period observations. Once broader controls for educational upgrading, productivity change, sectoral transformation and macroeconomic adjustment are incorporated, the estimated e??ects weaken substantially and frequently lose statistical significance. Dynamic estimation and causality analysis further provide limited support for a stable one-directional causal mechanism running from labour-market deregulation toward inequality. Instead, Portuguese inequality appears to have evolved jointly with broader processes of structural modernization, globalization, technological change and repeated macroeconomic adjustment. Overall, the findings caution against interpreting labour-market deregulation as the dominant driver of Portuguese inequality and emphasize the importance of evaluating labour-market institutions within a broader framework balancing equity, productivity and economic adaptability. |
| Keywords: | income inequality; labour-market liberalisation; trade unions; Portugal; structural reforms. |
| JEL: | D31 J08 J51 C22 O52 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ise:remwps:wp04192026 |
| By: | Zhang Chen; Chen Kay |
| Abstract: | This review summarizes the historical development of probability measures in asset pricing, from early mathematical finance and state price theory to risk-neutral valuation, martingale measures, forward measures, stochastic discount factors, incomplete-market measure selection, benchmark pricing, robust and nonlinear pricing, and modern data-driven probability transformations. The central theme is that asset pricing is not merely an exercise in estimating physical probabilities. Instead, pricing theory constructs, transforms, or selects probability measures so that market prices can be represented as expectations after discounting, numeraire normalization, marginal utility weighting, entropy penalization, calibration, or information conditioning. The paper emphasizes landmark contributions including Bachelier's probabilistic model of speculation, Arrow-Debreu state-contingent claims, Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing, Harrison-Kreps and Harrison-Pliska's martingale formalization, Delbaen and Schachermayer's fundamental theorem, Breeden-Litzenberger implied state price densities, change of numeraire methods, Hansen-Jagannathan stochastic discount factor restrictions, Cochrane's SDF synthesis, and recent empirical and machine learning work on learned pricing kernels. Text-, attention-, and sentiment-based probability transformations are treated as recent information-adjusted forecasting extensions that complement, rather than replace, martingale, numeraire, SDF, and incomplete-market frameworks. The paper also collects key formulas for state prices, stochastic discount factors, Radon-Nikodym densities, Girsanov changes of measure, risk-neutral valuation, forward measures, implied densities, coherent risk measures, benchmark pricing, learned SDFs, and information-adjusted forecasting. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.27658 |
| By: | Alfie Chadwick; Simon D. Angus; Libby Lester |
| Abstract: | Legislative chambers are central institutions of democratic governance, where representatives debate policy, justify decisions, and are held accountable. In Australia, the principal record of what is said and done in parliament is the official parliamentary transcript, commonly known in Westminster systems as Hansard. Yet while these records are publicly accessible, they are difficult to use at scale because they are not readily queryable, computationally integrated, or suitable for systematic longitudinal analysis. This paper addresses that problem by introducing Hansard DB, a relational database of Australian federal parliamentary speech spanning Federation to the present. Hansard DB integrates speeches, questions, answers, and interjections with parliamentarian metadata from the Parliamentary Handbook. Built through a multi-stage parsing and validation pipeline, the database supports flexible querying across text and metadata for large-scale and longitudinal analysis. The paper also discusses the epistemic limitations of Hansard research. The official transcripts are edited and incomplete records of political speech, shaped by institutional rules, editorial practices, and omissions of tone, gesture, and context. Hansard DB therefore contributes not only a usable database, but also guidance for interpreting parliamentary transcripts acconting for these limitations. |
| Keywords: | text-as-data, natural language processing, political speech |
| JEL: | D72 C80 H11 |
| Date: | 2026–05–22 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ajr:sodwps:paper_1779665234420_559 |
| By: | Damien Broussolle (LaRGE Research Center, Université de Strasbourg) |
| Abstract: | This paper offers a critical reinterpretation of the Pierre Rivière case, the infamous matricide of 1835, as presented by Jeanne Favret-Saada (2026). While this structural approach constitutes an undisputable contribution, it nevertheless neglects the psychological dimension of the protagonists. Based on a close study of Pierre Rivière’s memoir and the trial records, this paper examines the mental attitudes of the three central figures of the tragedy — the son, the mother, and the father — which helps explain the unique nature of the case. Overall, a balanced understanding of the tragedy requires combining social constraints with individual psychological factors. |
| Keywords: | criminal case ; methodology ; gender studies |
| JEL: | Z13 B59 K14 K38 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lar:wpaper:2026-04 |