Despite a recent and dramatic re-evaluation of the health consequences of alcohol consumption, very little is known about the effects of in utero exposure to alcohol on long-run outcomes such as later-life mortality. Here, we investigate how state by year variation in alcohol control arising from the repeal of federal prohibition affects mortality for cohorts born in the 1930s. We find that individuals born in wet states experienced higher later-life mortality than individuals born in dry states, translating into a 3.3% increase in mortality rates between 1990 and 2004 for affected cohorts.

Federal prohibition was one of the most ambitious policy interventions in US history. However, the removal of restrictions on alcohol after 1933 was not uniform. Using a new balanced panel on annual deaths, we find that city-level repeal is associated with a 11.6% decrease in the rate of death by non-automobile accidents, a category which critically include accidental poisonings. We relate this finding to a large literature which emphasizes - but never precisely quantifies - the mortality effects of adulterated alcohol during federal prohibition. Thus, repeal likely led to a large annual reduction in accidental poisonings. However, combined with previous results showing even larger increases in infant mortality, repeal nonetheless likely had negative contemporaneous effects on public health.

In this chapter, we describe long-run trends in global merchandise trade and immigration from 1870 to 2010.We revisit the reasons why these two forces moved largely in parallel in the decades leading up to World War I, collapsed during the interwar period, and then rebounded (but with much more pronounced growth in trade than in immigration).More substantively, we also document a large redistribution in the regional sources of goods and people with a shift from the former industrialized core countries-especially Europe-to those in the former peripheryespecially Asia-as well as a very striking change in the composition of merchandise trade towards manufactured goods precisely dating from 1950.Finally, using a triple differences framework in combination with a dramatic change in US immigration policy, we find evidence that immigration and trade potentially acted as substitutes, at least for the United States in the interwar period.

Using new data on county-level variation in alcohol prohibition from 1933 to 1939, we investigate whether the repeal of federal prohibition increased infant mortality, both in counties and states that repealed and in neighbouring counties. We find that repeal is associated with a 4.0% increase in infant mortality rates in counties that chose wet status via local option elections or state-wide legislation and with a 4.7% increase in neighbouring dry counties, suggesting a large role for cross-border policy externalities. These estimates imply that roughly twenty-seven thousand excess infant deaths could be attributed to the repeal of federal prohibition in this period.

We provide evidence on the dynamic effects of fuel price shocks, shipping demand shocks, and shipping supply shocks on real dry bulk freight rates in the long run.We first analyze a new and large dataset on dry bulk freight rates for the period from 1850 to 2020, finding that they followed a downward but undulating path with a cumulative decline of 79%.Next, we turn to understanding the drivers of booms and busts in the dry bulk shipping industry, finding that shipping demand shocks strongly dominate all others as drivers of real dry bulk freight rates in the long run.Furthermore, while shipping demand shocks have increased in importance over time, shipping supply shocks in particular have become less relevant.

We provide evidence on the dynamic effects of aggregate commodity demand shocks, commodity supply shocks, and storage demand or other commodity-specific demand shocks on real commodity prices. We analyze a new data set of price and production levels for 12 agricultural goods, metals, and soft commodities from 1870 to 2013. We establish that commodity demand shocks strongly dominate commodity supply shocks in driving prices over a broad set of commodities and over a long period of time. While commodity demand shocks have gained importance over time, commodity supply shocks have become less relevant.

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this particular historical episode provide for the present day? To answer these questions, we distinguish between long-run secular trends in the period from 1920 to 1939 related to the formation of trade blocs (in particular, the British Commonwealth) and short-run disruptions associated with the trade wars of the 1930s (in particular, large and widespread declines in bilateral trade, the narrowing of trade imbalances, and sharp drops in average traded distances). We argue that the trade wars mainly served to intensify pre-existing efforts towards the formation of trade blocs which dated from at least 1920. More speculatively, we argue that the trade wars of the present day may serve a similar purpose as those in the 1930s, that is, the intensification of China- and US-centric trade blocs.

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this particular historical episode provide for the present day? To answer these questions, we distinguish between long-run secular trends in the period from 1920 to 1939 related to the formation of trade blocs (in particular, the British Commonwealth) and short-run disruptions associated with the trade wars of the 1930s (in particular, large and widespread declines in bilateral trade, the narrowing of trade imbalances, and sharp drops in average traded distances). We argue that the trade wars mainly served to intensify pre-existing efforts towards the formation of trade blocs which dated from at least 1920. More speculatively, we argue that the trade wars of the present day may serve a similar purpose as those in the 1930s, that is, the intensification of Chinaand US-centric trade blocs. JEL classification: F1, F3, N7

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this particular historical episode provide for the present day? To answer these questions, we distinguish between long-run secular trends in the period from 1920 to 1939 related to the formation of trade blocs (in particular, the British Commonwealth) and short-run disruptions associated with the trade wars of the 1930s (in particular, large and widespread declines in bilateral trade, the narrowing of trade imbalances, and sharp drops in average traded distances). We argue that the trade wars mainly served to intensify pre-existing efforts towards the formation of trade blocs which dated from at least 1920. More speculatively, we argue that the trade wars of the present day may serve a similar purpose as those in the 1930s, that is, the intensification of Chinaand UScentric trade blocs.

We examine the evolution of market potential and its role in driving economic growth over the long twentieth century.Theoretically, we exploit a structural gravity model to derive a closed-form solution for a widely-used measure of market potential.We are thus able to express market potential as a function of directly observable and easily estimated variables.Empirically, we collect a large dataset on aggregate and bilateral trade flows as well as output for 51 countries.We find that market potential exhibits an upward trend across all regions of the world from the early 1930s and that this trend significantly deviates from the evolution of world GDP.Finally, using exogenous variation in trade-related distances to world markets, we demonstrate a significant causal role of market potential in driving global income growth over this period.

To what degree were Chinese financial markets integrated with the rest of the world prior to the 1949 Revolution and to what extent was the Chinese foreign exchange market efficient during this period? We estimate silver points for the Shanghai market from 1905 to 1933 to answer these questions. Our inferred measures are small in value, favorably match measured costs of the silver trade derived from contemporary accounts, and fare well in the comparison to estimates of trans-Atlantic gold points. This leads to the conclusion that the degree of Chinese financial market integration was substantial. However, during and immediately after World War I, our estimates of the silver points increased appreciably, foreshadowing the collapse of China's linkages to world financial markets beginning in the 1930s.

AbstractIn this paper, we generalise conventional measures of the effective rate of protection by: (i) relaxing their small‐country assumptions; (ii) taking into account multiple stages of production; and (iii) abstracting away from their assumptions on the time‐invariance of the underlying technology using annual IO tables. We apply our new measure to China's structure of tariff protection from 1992 to 2010. When compared to conventional measures, we find its effective rates of protection to be smaller in magnitude and even negative in some sectors. The new measures are also related to industry characteristics in sensible ways, calling into question the applicability of conventional measures in the context of present‐day China.

What drives commodity prices in the long run? We provide evidence on the dynamic effects of global demand shocks, commodity supply shocks, and inventory demand shocks on real commodity prices. In particular, we analyze a new data set of price and production levels for 14 agricultural, metal, and soft commodities from 1850 to 2012. We identify differences in the type of shock driving prices of the various types of commodities and relate these differences to commodity types which presumably reflect differences in long-run elasticities of supply and demand. Preliminary results show that demand shocks strongly dominate supply shocks.

This paper considers the evidence on real commodity prices from 1900 to 2015 for 40 commodities, representing 8.72 trillion US dollars of production in 2011. In doing so, it suggests and documents a comprehensive typology of real commodity prices, comprising long-run trends, medium-run cycles, and short-run boom/bust episodes. The main findings can be summarized as follows: (1) real commodity prices have been on the rise—albeit modestly—from 1950; (2) there is a pattern—in both past and present—of commodity price cycles, entailing large and long-lived deviations from underlying trends; (3) these commodity price cycles are themselves punctuated by boom/bust episodes which are historically pervasive.

Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions form the scientific backbone of the current global change debate. Although some European records extend into medieval times, high-resolution, long-term, regional-scale paleoclimatic evidence is missing for the eastern part of the continent. Here we compile 545 samples of living trees and historical timbers from the greater Tatra region to reconstruct interannual to centennial-long variations in Eastern European May-June temperature back to 1040 AD. Recent anthropogenic warming exceeds the range of past natural climate variability. Increased plague outbreaks and political conflicts, as well as decreased settlement activities, coincided with temperature depressions. The Black Death in the mid-14th century, the Thirty Years War in the early 17th century, and the French Invasion of Russia in the early 19th century all occurred during the coldest episodes of the last millennium. A comparison with summer temperature reconstructions from Scandinavia, the Alps, and the Pyrenees emphasizes the seasonal and spatial specificity of our results, questioning those large-scale reconstructions that simply average individual sites.

In this paper, we document the disintegration of international commodity markets between 1913 and 1938. There was dramatic disintegration during World War I, gradual reintegration during the 1920s, and then a substantial disintegration after 1929. The period saw the unravelling of many of the integration gains of 18701913. While increased transport costs help explain the wartime disintegration, they cannot explain the post-1929 increase in trade costs. The proliferation of tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, the collapse of the interwar gold standard, and the evaporation of commercial credit loom large as suspects.

What are the gains from international trade? And how do immigrants influence this process? We consider the case of Canada, document its experience with import variety growth in the period from 1988 to 2007, and relate this variety growth to the process of immigration. We find that import varieties grew 76%, that this growth is associated with a welfare gain to Canadian consumers as large as 28%, and that enhanced immigration flows may be responsible for 25% of this variety growth and its attendant welfare gains for native-born Canadians.

Australian Economic History ReviewVolume 51, Issue 3 p. 318-319 Secular Cycles – Edited by Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov David S. Jacks, David S. Jacks Simon Fraser UniversitySearch for more papers by this author David S. Jacks, David S. Jacks Simon Fraser UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 November 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8446.2010.00312.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume51, Issue3November 2011Pages 318-319 RelatedInformation