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Introduction to Economic History
Readings
<
https://www.icloud.com/pages/0xoFI9oBxlF8SufEZlrMb3jww
>
January 17
:
Introduction
<
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0hG-
cAOXVaoODqdUw_Rc757Bw
>
January 24:
The Malthusian Economy (DeLong)
<
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/
06n0DS9RWZS9yreEBvjmqHXSg
>
Richard Steckel (2008), "Biological Measures of the Standard of Living,"
Journal of Economic
Perspectives
22:1 Winter), pp. 129-52
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.
22.1.129.
Moses Finley (1965), "Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World,"
Economic History Review
NS 18:1, pp. 29-45
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2591872
Jared Diamond (1987), “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”,
Discover
http://
tinyurl.com/3cz4dbm
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn. 2013. “On the Origins of Gender Roles:
Women and the Plough.”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
128 (May), pp. 469–530.
http://
qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/128/2/469.full.pdf
Gregory Clark (2005), “Living Standards and the Logic of the Malthusian Era," draft of
A
Farewell to Alms
(published version: Princeton University Press, 2007),
http://tinyurl.com/
dl20090112e
,
http://tinyurl.com/dl20090112j
Gregory Clark (2005), “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004,”
Journal of
Political Economy
113 (December), pp. 1307–1340
www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/ .pdf
January
31:
Revving Up Progress: Commercial Revolutions (DeLong)
<
https://
www.icloud.com/keynote/0Mr0-Gh0dWNCKh8iwG9jcrCnA
>
J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1993), “Princes and Merchants: European City Growth
before the Industrial Revolution,”
Journal of Law & Economics
36, pp. 671-702.
http://
www.jstor.org/stable/725804
1
Jeremiah E. Dittmar (2011), “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the
Printing Press,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
126 (August), pp. 1133–1172.
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/126/3/1133.abstract
Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth (2013), “The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War,
and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe,”
Review of Economic Studies
80 (May), pp. 774–811.
http://restud.oxfordjournals.org/content/80/2/774.full.pdf
Stephen Broadberry (2013), “Accounting for the Great Divergence,” unpublished manuscript,
London School of Economics,
http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/workingPapers/2013/WP184.pdf
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2005), "The Rise of Europe: Atlantic
Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,"
American Economic Review
95:3, pp.
546-79.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132729
February 7:
The Industrial Revolution (DeLong)
<
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/
0laERCExksFy-GSSYslIoO2sA
>
Pol Antràs and Hans-Joachim Voth (2003), “Factor Prices and Productivity Growth during the
British Industrial Revolution,”
Explorations in Economic History
40 (January), pp. 52–77.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498302000244/pdfft?
md5=349ca4b07574f1bd1bd2d7058f76879d&pid=1-s2.0-S0014498302000244-main.pdf
Peter Temin. 1997, “Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution,”
Journal of Economic
History
57 (March), pp.63–82.
www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2951107.pdf
Stephen Nicholas and Richard H. Steckel (1991), “Heights and Living Standards of English
Workers during the Early Years of Industrialization, 1770–1815,”
Journal of Economic History
51 (December), pp.937–957.
www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2123399.pdf
Robert C. Allen (2011), “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced
Invention and the Scientifi c Revolution,”
Economic History Review
64, pp. 357-384.
http://
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00532.x/pdf
Nicholas Crafts (2002), "The Solow Productivity Paradox in Historical Perspective," CEPR
Discussion Paper no.3142
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP3142.asp
Jeffrey Williamson (1984), "Why Was British Economic Growth So Slow During the Industrial
Revolution?"
Journal of Economic History
44, pp.687-712
http://www.jstor.org/view/00220507/
di975668/97p1230f/0
February
14:
Modern Economic Growth (DeLong)
<
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/
0m3FTjXb5GxSVumCPZRuKu47w
>
Michael Kremer (1993), "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to
1990,"
Quarterly Journal of Economics
108:3 (August), pp. 681-716
http://www.jstor.org/stable/
2118405
2
William D. Nordhaus (1997), “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The
History of Lighting Suggests Not.” In
The Economics of New Goods
, edited by Timothy F.
Bresnahan and Robert J. Gordon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for NBER, pp. 29– 66.
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064
Dave Donaldson (2016), “Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation
Infrastructure,” forthcoming,
American Economic Review
.
http://www.nber.org/papers/
w16487.pdf
J. Bradford DeLong (1991), “Did J. P. Morgan’s Men Add Value? An Economist’s Perspective on
Financial Capitalism”, in
Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of
Information
edited by Peter Temin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for NBER), pp. 205–
236.
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7182
Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist (2001), “How Large are Human-Capital Externalities?
Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws,”
NBER Macroeconomic Annual
2000, pp.9-74
http://papers.nber.org/books/bern01-1
Peter Thompson (2001). “How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Learn? New Evidence for an
Old Case Study,”
Journal of Political Economy
109 (February), pp.103–137.
www.jstor.org/
stable/pdfplus/10.1086/318605.pdf
F
ebruary 21: Influenza
F
ebruary
28.
Unfreedom (DeLong)
<
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/
0nxvQH7tFWvVy2k4uMOBcLOCA
>
Robert Brenner (1976), "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial
Europe,”
Past & Present
70 (Feb.), pp. 30-75
http://www.jstor.org/stable/650345
Nathan Nunn (2008), “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,”
Quarterly Journal of
Economics
123 (February), pp.139–176.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25098896.pdf
Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff (1994), "Factor Endowments, Institutions and
Differential Paths of Development among New World Economies: A View from Economic
Historians of the United States," NBER Working Paper no. 10066 http://papers.nber.org/papers/
h0066
Ralph Austen and Woodruff D. Smith (1992), "Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue:
The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization," in Joseph E. Imkori
and Stanley L. Engerman, eds.,
The Atlantic Slave Trade
(Durham, N.C., Duke University Press,
pp. 183-203
http://tinyurl.com/dl20090122b
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), "Manifesto of the Communist Party"
http://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Suresh Naidu and Noam Yuchtman (2013), “Coercive Contract Enforcement: Law and the Labor
Market in Nineteenth Century Industrial Britain,”
American Economic Review
103 (February),
pp.107–144.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.103.1.107
3
March 7 (I)
Comparative Development and Underdevelopment (DeLong)
<
https://
www.icloud.com/keynote/0021dZ3X9btGL8HmUfi mCwApA
>
Karl Marx (1853),"The Future Results of British Rule in India,"
New York Daily Tribune
(August
8)
http://tinyurl.com/dl20090112l
Lant Pritchett (1997), "Divergence, Big Time,"
Journal of Economic Perspectives
(Summer), pp.
3-17,
http://tinyurl.com/dl20090112o
Gregory Clark (1987), “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills,”
Journal of Economic History
47 (March), pp.141–173.
www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/
2121943.pdf
W. Arthur Lewis (1978),
Evolution of the International Economic Order
(Princeton, Princeton
Univ. Press), pp. 2-25, 38-57
http://tinyurl.com/dl20090112m
Dani Rodrik (1995), "Getting Interventions Right: How South Korea and Taiwan Grew Rich,"
Economic Policy
20, pp. 55-107,
http://tinyurl.com/dl20090112t
Susan Wolcott and Gregory Clark (1999), "Why Nation's Fail: Managerial Decisions and
Performance in Indian Cotton Textiles, 1890-1938,"
Journal of Economic History
, June
http://
links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507
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28199906
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2959
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3AWNFMDA%3E2.0.CO
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March 7 (II
) Inequality
(DeLong)
<
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/
0LvoKeQzg11t3SWw7NbOyYONA
>
Branko Milanovic,
Peter H. Lindert,
and
Jeffrey G. Williamson
(2010), “Pre-Industrial
Inequality”,
Economic Journal
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.
1468-0297.2010.02403.x/abstract
Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman (2014), “Capital Is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich
Countries 1700–2010,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
129 (August), pp/.255–1310.
http://
qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/129/3/1255.full.pdf
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (200
7
),
“
The Race between Education and Technology
”
NBER working paper 12984 <
http://delong.typepad.com/fi les/goldin-and-katzthe-race-
between-education-and-technology.pdf
>
Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie (2013), “Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain
and the United States since 1850,”
American Economic Review
103 (June), pp.1109–1137.
https://www.aeaweb.org/atypon.php?return_to=/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.103.4.1109
March
8:
American Exceptionalism
(Eichengreen)
4
Kenneth Sokoloff (1984), “Was the Transition from the Artisanal Shop to the Non-Mechanized
Factory Associated with Gains in Effi ciency?”
Explorations in Economic History
21, pp.
351-382.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1386
Daron Acemoglu (2010),
“When Does Labor Scarcity Encourage Innovation?”
Journal of
Political Economy
188, pp.1037-1078.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/
10.1086/658160
Dave Donaldson and Richard Hornbeck (2016), “Railroads and American Economic Growth: A
‘Market Access’ Approach,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
131 (2), pp.799-858.
https://
academic.oup.com/qje/article/131/2/799/2606976
Alfred Chandler (1990),
Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
, Chapter 3, pp.
47-89. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. On reserve at Graduate Services.
March
14:
(II)
Capital Markets
Naomi Lamoreaux (1986), “Banks, Kinship, and Economic Development: The New England
Case,”
Journal of Economic History
46, pp. 647-667.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2121478
Lance E. Davis (1965),
“The Investment Market, 1870-1914: The Evolution of a National
Market,”
Journal of Economic History
25, pp. 355-393.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2116175
Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Ogilvie (1996), “Universal Banks and German Industrialization: A
Reappraisal,”
Economic History Review
49:3, pp. 427-446.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1996.tb00576.x/abstract
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (2013), “Financial and Sovereign Debt Crises: Some
Lessons Learned and Those Forgotten,” IMF Working Paper no. WP/13/266 (December)
http://
www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=41173.0
March 21. Labor Markets (Eichengreen)
Sanford Jacoby (1984),
Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions and the Transformation of
Work in American Industry 1900-1945
, Chapters 1 and 2, pp.13-64. New York: Columbia
University Press. On reserve at Graduate Services.
Susan Carter and Elizabeth Savoca (1990), “Labor Mobility and Lengthy Jobs in 19
th
Century
America,”
Journal of Economic History
50, pp. 1-16.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2123435?
seq=1
#
page_scan_tab_contents
Goldin, Claudia and Kenneth Sokoloff (1984), “The Relative Productivity Hypothesis of
Industrialization: The American Case, 1820 to 1850,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
99, pp.
461-487.
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/99/3/461.short
Claudia Goldin (2001), “The Human-Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the
Past,”
Journal of Economic History
61, pp.263-292.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8239
5
Martha Bailey (2013), “Fifty Years of Family Planning: New Evidence on the Long-Run Effects
of Increasing Access to Contraception,” NBER Working Paper no. 19493.
http://www.nber.org/
papers/w19493
April 4. International Money and Finance (Eichengreen)
Michael Bordo and Hugh Rockoff (1996), “The Gold Standard as a ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval,”
Journal of Economic History
56, pp.389-428,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2123971?
seq=1
#
page_scan_tab_contents
Hugh Rockoff (1984), “Some Evidence on the Real Price of Gold, Its Costs of Production and
Commodity Prices,”
in Michael Bordo and Anna J. Schwartz (eds.),
A Retrospective on the
Classical Gold Standard,
” pp. 613-650. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
http://
ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/11139.html
Warren Weber (2016),
“A Bitcoin Standard: Lessons from the Gold Standard,” Bank of Canada
Staff Working Paper no.2016-14,
http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2016/03/staff-working-paper-2016-14/
April 1
1
. Origins of the Great Depression (Eichengreen)
Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963),
A Monetary History of the United States,
1867-1960,
Chapter 13, pp. 676-700.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. On reserve at
Graduate Services.
Gary Richardson and William Troost (2009), “Monetary Intervention Mitigated Banking Panics
during the Great Depression: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Federal Reserve District
Border in Mississippi, 1929 to 1933,”
Journal of Political Economy
117 (6), pp.1031-1073.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/649603
Christina Romer (1990), "The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression,"
Quarterly
Journal of Economics
104, pp. 719-736.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2937892
Ben Bernanke (1995), “The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative
Approach,”
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
27:1, pp. 1-28.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/i336266
April 1
8
. Recovery from the Great Depression (Eichengreen)
Christina Romer (1992), “What Ended the Great Depression?”
Journal of Economic History
52,
pp. 757-784.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2123226
Gauti Eggertsson (2008), “Great Expectations and the End of the Great Depression,”
American
Economic Review
98:4, pp. 1476-1516.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/29730131
Charles Calomiris, Joseph Mason and David Wheelock (2011), “Did Doubling Reserve
Requirements Create the Recession of 1937-8?” NBER Working Paper no.16688 (January).
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16688
6
Joshua Hausman (2016), “Fiscal Policy and Economic Recovery: The Case of the 1936 Veterans’
Bonus,”
American Economic Review
106, pp.1100-1143
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20130957
April 2
5
. The Golden Age and the Great Compression
Claudia Goldin (1991), “The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women’s Employment,”
American Economic Review
81 (4), pp.741-756.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/
10.1086/649603
Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo (1992),
“The Great Compression: The U.S. Wage Structure at
Midcentury,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
107 (1), pp.1-34.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/
article/107/1/1/1925779
Gavin Wright (1987), “The Economic Revolution in the American South,”
Journal of Economic
Perspectives
1 (1), pp.161-178.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.1.1.161
Taylor Jaworski (2017), “World War II and the Industrialization of the American South,” NBER
Working Paper no. 23477 (2017).
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23477
7
Memo Question for January 24 Class: Commercial Revolutions
: Between the discovery of
agriculture and the year 1500 or so, in the large we see an economic world in which (a) total
factor productivity growth was very, very slow, and (b) as a result the overwhelming effect of
technological progress was not to raise standards of living above "bare subsistence" but rather to
increase human numbers.
These readings are all pieces arguing that, in western Europe at least, this Malthusian ice age
was beginning to thaw starting around 1500 or so: things were happening to raise the rate of total
factor productivity growth—and population growth was no longer able to soak all of the effects of
technological progress up. Pick one paper. Do you think it makes a convincing case? How much
of a difference in global economic trends do you think that paper's factors
by themselves
could
have made?
Memo Question for January 31 Class: The Industrial Revolution
: Compared to what we have
seen in our lives—and in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents—
the pace of productivity growth and economic structural change even in Britain over 1700-1850
seems appallingly slow. Compared to what came earlier it seems remarkably rapid. Frame
several possible hypotheses about why either British growth 1700-1850 was so much faster than
western European growth 1400-1700 or British growth 1700-1850 was so much slower than
global growth has been since 1850.
I have scheduled an appointment with at least one of the professors
Memo Question for February 7 Class: Modern Economic Growth
: Economics tends to view
growth as a continuous and diffuse process: if one fi rm does not solve the problem of how to
effi ciently utilize resources, others will and drive the fi rst out of business; if one technological vein
plays itself out, energy will focus on others. These readings all argue different. They argue one
side of a debate. They argue either that some unique and particular institutions and technologies
matter a lot. What kinds of evidence not presented in these reading might lead you to come down
on one or the other of the many, many sides in this debate—either on the side of economists'
standard prior, or that in fact it is still other and still different institutions or technologies or simply
the aggregate state of the economy that matters the most?
Memo Question for February 14 Class: Unfreedom
: What relevance and use does a work like
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), "Manifesto of the Communist Party" have to twenty-fi rst
century economists today?
Memo Question for February 28 Class: Comparative Development and Underdevelopment:
Karl Marx's expectations for the economic development of India over 1850-1900 under the impact
of western colonialism were, all in all, profoundly optimistic. Blood, chaos, revolution, yes—but
also rapid economic development as the British millocracy throws a net of railways over India...
and consequences ensue. All fi ve of the other papers are trying to grapple with why Marx's
predictions were false. Pick one paper. How good a job do you think it does?
8
Memo Question
for March 7 Class
:
Inequality
: In an economy with constant returns to scale,
perfect competition, symmetric information, and no externalities—neither physical externalities in
production nor psychological externalities in consumption—the market equilibrium can be thought
of as the maximum of a social welfare function in which each individual's weight is proportional to
the inverse of their marginal utility of wealth. Thus if everybody (say) has the same utility function
that is logarithmic in wealth, the market's implicit social welfare function will weigh each person by
their wealth when it makes its interpersonal utility tradeoffs. Pick one paper. What light does it
shed on whether the market's implicit social welfare function is a sensible one to maximize?
Memo Question for March 14: Capital Markets
: Naomi Lamoreau and Jeremy Edwards/
Sheilagh Ogalvie describe the role of banks in the early industrialization of the United States and
Germany. (Economic historians generally date sustained industrial growth as commencing about
50 years later in Germany than the United States.) They describe the banks' structure and role
as being very different in the two cases. What explains these differences?
Memo Question for March 21: Labor Markets
: Claudia Goldin and Martha Bailey point to mass
secondary education and access to modern contraceptive methods as two factors influencing the
changing labor force participation, wages and, more generally, economic status of women. How
would you evaluate the relative importance of these two factors?
Paper Prospectus
Memo Question for April 4: International Money and Finance
: Many of the same people who
are fascinated by Bitcoin are fascinated by the gold standard. What are the problems with the
analogy? Is the comparison of Bitcoin with the gold standard fundamentally flawed? In what
ways?
Memo Question for April 11: Origins of the Great Depression
: Friedman and Schwartz's
"Monetary History of the United States" is referred to as one of the most influential books in
historical macroeconomics, or even in all of macroeconomics, written in the 20th century.
Describe their methodology. What is it about that methodology that has made that book so
influential? If you were to write their book today, how would you write it differently?
Memo Question for April 18: Recovery from the Great Depression
: Charles Calomiris and his
coauthors disagree with Friedman and Schwartz on the role of increased reserve requirements in
the double-dip recession of 1937-8. Why do they disagree? How do you evaluate the evidence?
If you think that Friedman and Schwartz erred, then explain how two such smart and esteemed
scholars could have gotten it wrong.
9
Memo Question for April 25: The Golden Age and the Great Compression
: In an influential
article, Enrico Moretti and Pat Kline argue that the Tennessee Valley Authority had an enduring
impact on economic development in the treated region. In contrast, Taylor Jaworski in his
analysis of World War II spending in the South fi nds much less evidence of an enduring effect.
Why the difference? What are the implications for arguments about Big-Push Industrialization?
Memo Question for March 7 Class: American Exceptionalism
: Donaldson and Hornbeck
dispute Robert Fogel's conclusion that an expanded system of canals would have substituted well
for America's late-19th century railway network. What economic and historical arguments do
Donaldson and Hornbeck make to buttress their point? Would Fogel have found it convincing? If
not, why not?
Final Paper
10
