We construct an annual price index for the Cape Colony, 1718–1812, from more than 200,000 transactions recorded in estate-auction rolls. These records allow us to compute Laspeyres indices for a broad set of goods, including productive assets (livestock, equipment, and enslaved persons) and household durables (major, minor, and luxury items). By moving beyond subsistence baskets, we capture both the cost of acquiring inputs used to generate income and the cost of furnishing a household in a pre-industrial, highly regulated settler economy where wage data are sparse or distorted. We show that auction-derived price movements align with independent proxies for economic conditions—such as ship traffic, pacht prices, consumer prices, and GDP per capita—and that household durables became cheaper relative to productive assets over the long run. These patterns suggest that auction prices provide a useful complementary lens on living standards in colonial contexts where conventional real wage series are unavailable or institutionally constrained.
This contribution revisits the origins of the concept of creative destruction by returning to Werner Sombart’s Krieg und Kapitalismus (1913). Although Sombart never used the expression schöpferische Zerstörung, a systematic page-by-page reading shows that he articulated a destruction–creation mechanism that anticipates the structural logic later formalized by Joseph Schumpeter. Sombart presents war as simultaneously destructive and generative, arguing that fiscal, institutional, and ecological ruptures are not peripheral to capitalism but central to its emergence. His analysis of deforestation, scarcity, and technological substitution (especially the transition from wood to coal and coke) offers an early model of how material crises can trigger innovations that reshape production systems and energy regimes. The article also examines the subsequent marginalization of Sombart’s contribution, situating it within the broader methodological and political transformations of twentieth-century economics. It contrasts Sombart’s historically grounded mechanism with the evolution of Schumpeter’s thinking from 1911 to 1942, when the canonical formulation of creative destruction finally emerged. More broadly, the paper reflects on the historical evolution of economic concepts, illustrating how scientific ideas often achieve recognition not through priority of insight alone, but through subsequent reinterpretation, analytical elaboration, and institutionalization. Reassessing Sombart thus enriches the genealogy of creative destruction and sheds new light on contemporary debates surrounding innovation, energy transitions, geopolitical conflict, and artificial intelligence. Building on recent work by Acemoglu, Mokyr, and others, the article argues that Sombart emerges not as the inventor of the term but as the first thinker to articulate its structural logic. More fundamentally, it suggests that the history of creative destruction itself illustrates a broader movement from historical interpretation (Verstehen) toward analytical explanation (Erklären), reminding us that concepts, no less than data, have histories of their own.
This paper reconstructs and examines the portfolios of 75 foreign investment funds (FIFs) active in the Spanish stock market between 1961 and 1978. Spain during this period offers a revealing case study, as the country transitioned from autarkic isolation toward progressive liberalisation and rapid economic growth, while remaining under the institutional constraints of the Franco regime. Drawing on a hand-collected panel dataset from the Boletín Financiero of the Barcelona Stock Exchange—encompassing over 4000 quarterly transactions and 153 securities— we evaluate investment returns, portfolio composition, concentration, and turnover across three distinct investment cycles. Applying the Direct Alpha method and asset-pricing models (CAPM, Henriksson- Merton, Fama-French three-factor), we find that FIFs consistently outperformed Spanish benchmarks, generating annualised abnormal returns of approximately 2.8-3.2
This paper presents Lithuania’s first uninterrupted GDP per capita time-series in international dollars for 1940–1995, completing a continuous 1913/1919–2024 dataset. Gathering extensive published and archival sources and applying CIA-style national accounting methods, it fills an important gap in European historical statistics. The paper also establishes a replicable framework for reconstructing GDP in other Soviet republics, needed for regional economic analysis of the USSR and thus contributing to expanding economic historiography of the Soviet Union. The results reveal a catastrophic wartime decline, rapid post-war catch-up under Soviet rule, and a progressive stagnation from the 1970s onwards. Although detailed growth accounting is yet to be performed, growth in the 1950s and 1960s likely stemmed from the ‘advantages of backwardness’, reinforced by conditional factors such as coercive Soviet industrialisation, collectivisation, and inherited social capabilities. The Soviet institutions that facilitated early expansion across the socialist bloc, however, later suppressed innovation and adaptation there, arguably binding occupied Lithuania’s economy to the wider collapse of the socialist system.
Quebec (formerly Lower Canada) has long been thought to have suffered declining agricultural productivity—induced by soil erosion and local overpopulation—from the 1790s to the early 1850s, leading to a “painful modernization” as farming declined, while other sectors grew only modestly. Painful modernization is often invoked to explain the political crises of the era that led to Confederation in 1867. This paper shows that the painful modernization thesis has no empirical support. We show (a) agriculture’s decline was not driven by soil exhaustion, (b) total factor productivity (TFP) in farming consistently rose after the 1790s, and (c) TFP growth was even stronger in industries like timber, shipbuilding, and potash. Rather than stagnation, Quebec experienced economic restructuring, reshaping interpretations of Canadian economic and political history.
This paper examines the geography of U.S. venture capital during its formative decades of the 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on newly assembled data on Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs), VC firms, PhD production, and industrial R D laboratories, we show that specialized risk capital emerged where innovation-supporting institutions and educated populations were already concentrated. State-level analyses find that population, urbanization, and federal R D spending predict SBIC presence. At the metropolitan level, wartime OSRD-funded patents and PhD production predict both whether and how extensively venture capital took root. These historical findings underscore that policies expanding venture capital supply without the prerequisite human capital infrastructure face fundamental limitations.
This paper examines how access to railways influenced several socioeconomic dimensions—such as educational attainment, local revenues, child mortality, tuberculosis-related deaths, and the prevalence of industrial employment—across more than 12,500 Hungarian communities during 1880 and 1910. Using matching and inverse probability weighting estimators to identify causal effects for treated settlements, we uncover positive impacts on literacy rates, settlement income and tax, and industrial workforce participation. We find no statistically significant causal effect on TBC-related deaths and infant mortality.
A shortage of affordable housing can be exacerbated by wars, natural disasters, or rising demand. In response, governments impose rent control, capping rents. This policy has been used on a large scale since World War I and has gained new popularity, with rent brakes introduced in Germany, France, Ireland, and Spain between 2015 and 2023, and with the strengthening of rent control in Austria and the Netherlands in 2025. The roots of rent control policies date back to ancient Rome. Before the 20th century, rent control was applied on many occasions, but it was mainly limited to specific cities or neighborhoods, specific population groups (e.g., Jews, scholars, and prostitutes), and specific events (e.g., religious festivals). In some cases, however, it lasted for centuries, such as the rent freeze in Madrid between 1564 and 1842. In most cases, rent control was a result of excess demand for housing rather than negative supply shocks. My examination of the factors behind the adoption of rent control reveals that wars, the establishment of universities, and the presence of Jewish communities made its adoption more likely.
How do minority-ruled regimes respond to nationalist movements by the demographic majority? We examine whether the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) adjusted the ethnic composition of prefectural officials in response to nationalist uprisings during the final decade of the dynasty. Using prefectural tenure records of 483 Manchu and Mongolian officials from 1900 to 1912, we construct a new dataset covering 352 prefectures. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we find that nationalist uprisings significantly reduced the number of Manchu and Mongolian officials at the prefectural level. The effect was not driven by top-down co-optation or a deliberate reduction in Manchu appointments; instead, it resulted from a higher rate of exit among Manchu officials in affected areas.
In 1900, women constituted more than 10 percent of practicing physicians in some cities, but the share of American physicians who were female declined in the early twentieth century. This decline is often linked to the professionalization of medical practice and associated changes in medical education that led to a wave of medical school closures. Using a newly constructed panel dataset of medical colleges, we show that women’s access to medical education was blocked by the closure of schools with traditionally high female enrollments. While we find evidence that male enrollment dropped when schools added requirements for pre-medical school college coursework, we do not find similar effects for women. The findings suggest that women were held to higher standards for admission than were men prior to the educational reforms.
We present the first national, regional, and sectoral GDP estimates for interwar Poland. Our estimates indicate that the economy performed substantially better than is commonly assumed. Between 1924 and 1938, real GDP per capita rose by 41
Over the seventeenth century, France relied mainly on private agents to build its state capacity but it shifted gradually to public agents, the intendants. We document this centralization process. The intendants’ appointment occurred at different times across the country. Their alternating arrivals and departures in the généralités created sequences of presence and vacancy that our empirical strategy leverages. Using an original panel dataset, we identify a causal effect of the intendants’ presence on tax revenues, tax and food riots. Before the 1635 Edict that permanently installed them, they operated occasional missions. They turned to be effective immediately—increasing tax revenues—but only in the pays d’états, provinces that kept the privilege to negotiate on taxation. Under Richelieu and Mazarin governments, from 1635 to 1660, they resisted as the intendants’ presence triggered a decrease in tax revenues. In the less autonomous provinces, the pays d’élections, the intendants’ presence led tax revenues to increase but it caused tax riots. Finally, the institution reached its maturity under Colbert and his successors:tax revenues increased sharply everywhere but so did tax riots. Moreover, the regulations taken by the intendants were insufficient to cope with food riots.
This paper uses building accounts from Exeter Cathedral to study weekly wage inequality in England between 1300 and 1514. In total, 86 building accounts are analyzed, yielding more than 25,000 weekly wage observations and over 100,000 paid workdays between 1300 and 1514. This material enables a week-to-week analysis of the changes in the distribution of earnings, capturing short-run fluctuations in labor utilization and pay within the building site and allowing the reconstruction of more than 3,300 weekly wage distributions. The paper documents long-run patterns in weekly wage inequality and examines its components by decomposing inequality into daily wages, working time, and their covariance. The results call into question the view that wage dispersion declined between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By linking wage inequality to the organization and timing of building activity, as well as workforce turnover, the analysis provides new evidence on how inequality originates within labor markets and on the role played by building cycles, and their interaction with the Black Death, in shaping the distribution of earnings.
The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and successful European companies operating in Asia and a forerunner of the modern corporation. Its trade grew substantially over the 1700s with suppliers and customers spanning multiple continents. By 1800 it was the largest supplier of Asian imports in Europe. It is thought that the Company’s shipping was especially innovative. In this paper, we are the first to examine the effects of shipping on the Company’s trade with Asia using a new annual series on shipping capacity from 1664 to 1833 merged with annual values of imports and exports. Our local projection estimates show that a shock to shipping capacity significantly increased the value of Company’s imports over a horizon of 6 years. The cumulative effect of a 1
Why are some regions rich and others poor? This study investigates the geographical origins of Italy’s persistent regional income gap. Using municipal population density as both a proxy for historical income and an outcome shaped by geography, we show that first-nature advantages, such as mild climates and fertile soils, predict higher population density in Northern Italy from the earliest available data (c. 500 AD). Second-nature forces (agglomeration and market connectivity) then reinforced this initial lead. We find that first- and second-nature geography jointly predict half of today’s municipal variation in income per capita, whereas Italy’s pre-unification regional histories account for only about one-fifth.
Economic liberty signifies the absence of coercion and interference in the actions of economic agents. Indices of economic freedom have been available since the late twentieth century, but we have lacked a long-term perspective. This paper examines economic freedom in a sample of 21 OECD countries over the past 170 years using a new Historical Index of Economic Liberty (HIEL), which revises and improves upon my earlier attempt to develop a historical index of economic freedom. Since the country sample represents a significant share of global-economic activity, this historical overview reflects economic freedom beyond the OECD club. Long-term gains in economic freedom reached nearly two-thirds of its maximum potential. The growth of economic freedom was abruptly halted by the world wars and resumed after 1950, peaking in 2000 before stagnating. International openness has been its primary contributing factor, especially after 1950. While the countries rankings remained relatively stable, the gap between their levels of economic freedom gradually narrowed.
This article examines how transport innovations can generate adverse health externalities by studying the expansion of the railway network in nineteenth-century England and Wales. Using detailed infant mortality and cause- and age-specific death rates, I show that railway access can account for one-third of the aggregate rise of infant mortality over a fifty-year period (1850–1900). The effect is concentrated in infectious diseases and dissipated once network coverage became nearly universal. To address problems of endogeneity, I exploit a least-cost path instrument between major centers, along with an event-study design, measures of market access, and matching methods. The findings reveal that transport connectivity accelerated disease transmission, delaying improvements in health despite rising incomes.
In 1685, Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes expelled some 200,000 Huguenots–one of the most skill-selective forced migrations in early modern Europe. While their contributions to England, Prussia, and the Dutch Republic are well documented, the economic losses borne by the French regions they left behind have remained surprisingly unmeasured, despite the Huguenots’ disproportionate role in textiles, luxury crafts, finance, and international trade. This paper provides the first economy-wide, micro-quantitative estimate of the long-run cost of this exodus for France. Using a newly assembled parish-level panel of Protestant baptism registers (1570–1700) linked to the industrial censuses of 1839 and 1860, we trace how a seventeenth-century demographic shock-shaped regional development nearly two centuries later. We uncover three core results. (1) A one-standard-deviation decline in Huguenot baptisms ( ≈ –20
In the final chapter of The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Émile Durkheim, the principal founder of French sociology, stresses the importance of adopting systematic quantitative comparisons in sociological research. First, quantitative methods enable the detection of previously unrecognized causalities and social laws that remain imperceptible through observation alone. Second, they assist in establishing and substantiating causal links. Durkheim even outlines two types of applications for serial quantitative analysis, distinguished by both static and dynamic perspectives. In this article, we argue that cliometrics offers a way to fulfill Durkheim’s initial (but soon abandoned) ambitions and transform sociology from a narrative discipline to one that incorporates quantitative methods and the precision they can bring to the treatment of social facts. This epistemological shift could open new avenues for both sociology and cliometrics.
This paper examines the nexus between technology and job polarization using Swedish firm-level data for 2001–2015, including information on ICT investments (2009–2015) for a subsample of mostly large firms. Our results show that ICT devices increased both the share of high-wage occupations characterized by abstract tasks and the share of middle-wage occupations characterized by routine tasks. ICT devices also reduced the share of low-wage occupations characterized by service tasks. These results question the previously proposed link between ICT and job polarization as postulated by the theory of Routine-Biased Technological Change. We argue that skill upgrading still applies at the firm level.
