Domestic market integration is central to economic growth, yet its nineteenth-century drivers remain debated. This article exploits newly constructed panel data on grain prices across 451 Spanish judicial districts (1847-1907) and a multimodal historical GIS dataset of roads, railroads, waterways, ports, and coastal routes to estimate district-pair transport costs via network analysis. Results show that transport improvements reduced average domestic transportation costs by 63 percent. To address the potential endogeneity of network expansion, we utilize an instrumentalvariables strategy based on Roman-era infrastructure and geographic least-cost paths, identifying a transport-cost elasticity of price differentials of approximately 0.8. Interacting this elasticity with the 63 percent fall in transport costs implies that the transition to steam transport accounts for roughly 85 percent of the observed price convergence over this period. Counterfactual simulations further demonstrate that these gains were primarily driven by railroads, confirming that this technology was a key condition for overcoming Spain's rugged geography and achieving a level of market integration comparable to that observed in the Western European core.
In the past, central banks were also retail institutions, directly accepting deposits from the public. This article studies a historical episode of flight-to-safety during a banking crisis in which large depositors withdrew their deposits from banks, moving them not only abroad or into cash, but also into the central bank. I ask how this safe-haven channel shaped the financial backdrop of democratization in interwar Spain. The 1931 proclamation of the Second Republic turned long-repressed demands for redistribution into a credible, if uncertain, redistributive threat to large depositors, triggering a run on bank deposits and capital flight, to which authorities responded by restricting capital mobility. Because opening and using a Banco de Espa & ntilde;a (BdE) retail account required a very high initial deposit and subsequent contributions, access was formally open but effectively restricted to large bank depositors. Using new branch-level balance-sheet data, I document a stronger flight-to-safety to BdE deposits in cities where banks lost more deposits, show that this inflow was persistent, and find that the BdE did not use it to expand credit or replace banks' lost intermediation due to the run on their deposits. Flight-to-safety into central bank liabilities thus let large depositors preserve the nominal value of their wealth, but without an offsetting expansion of public (central bank) money, the resulting fall in private money went uncompensated - contributing to the credit contraction that marked the democratic Republic's first months.
This paper examines the political consequences of debt deflation in interwar Germany. Debt deflation arises when falling prices increase the real burden of pre-existing nominal liabilities. We study this mechanism in the agricultural sector, where farmers had accumulated substantial nominal debt before 1929. In the face of collapsing agricultural prices and falling incomes, the high nominal interest burden made this debt unsustainable. To isolate the political effect of this shock, we exploit pre-deflation differences in agricultural debt and product mix across counties to construct a measure of debt deflation intensity. Our main finding is that rural debt deflation substantially increased support for the Nazi party, reflecting substitution away from agrarian and conservative parties. A one-standard-deviation increase in exposure explains a fifth of one standard deviation in the Nazi party vote share rise between 1928 and 1932. A counterfactual exercise suggests that without debt deflation, the Nazi party’s national vote share would have been insufficient to prevent less extreme parties from forming a majority coalition against it, rendering rural debt deflation a plausibly necessary condition for Hitler’s rise to power.
This paper examines how acute pollution exposure in historical London (1892-1919) affected child health. I proxy acute, extreme pollution exposure using daily data on fog events, which reflect meteorological conditions where pollution emitted in the city was not dispersed across space leading to a sharp spike in pollution. I also use rich individual-level data on child health drawn from the Queen Charlotte Hospital, a maternity hospital, and the Foundling Hospital, an orphanage. I find no effect of pollution exposure at birth on birth or growth outcomes or on upper respiratory morbidity. However, exposure on the day of birth had persistent effects on health, increasing mortality risk in childhood and adolescence from respiratory diseases and raising incidence, prevalence and sickness duration of influenza and measles. There was no persistent effect of in utero and postnatal pollution exposures. These mixed results show that extreme pollution at birth had lasting impacts on specific, but also limited, dimensions of child health.
