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"Economic Structure"
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MEASURING ECONOMIC POLICY UNCERTAINTY
We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence—including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles—indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our U.S. index spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt ceiling dispute, and other major battles over fiscal policy. Using firm-level data, we find that policy uncertainty is associated with greater stock price volatility and reduced investment and employment in policy-sensitive sectors like defense, health care, finance, and infrastructure construction. At the macro level, innovations in policy uncertainty foreshadow declines in investment, output, and employment in the United States and, in a panel vector autoregressive setting, for 12 major economies. Extending our U.S. index back to 1900, EPU rose dramatically in the 1930s (from late 1931) and has drifted upward since the 1960s.
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The corpse walker : real life stories, China from the bottom up
A compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the \"new\" China--the China of economic growth and globalization--is no more beneficial than the old. Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others--people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity. Liao's interviews were given from 1990 to 2003.--From amazon.com.
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FROM BAGHDAD TO LONDON: UNRAVELING URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN EUROPE, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND NORTH AFRICA, 800-1800
This paper empirically investigates why, between 800 and 1800, the urban center of gravity moved from the Islamic world to Europe. Using a large new city-specific data set covering Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, we unravel the role of geography and institutions in determining long-run city development in the two regions. We find that the main reasons for the Islamic world's stagnation and Europe's longterm success are specific to each region: any significant positive interaction between cities in the two regions hampered by their different main religious orientation. Together, the long-term consequences of a different choice of main transport mode (camel versus ship) and the development of forms of local participative government in Europe that made cities less dependent on the state explain why Europe's urban development eventually outpaced that in the Islamic world.
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Controlling contagion : epidemics and institutions from the black death to Covid
\"From the Black Death to Covid, infectious diseases have killed far more people than hunger or violence, and they still cause 40 per cent of deaths in developing countries today. Epidemic disease is one of our best laboratories for exploring how societies deal with negative externalities-a cost not paid wholly by oneself, but instead discharged partly onto other people. Once an epidemic is raging, it raises three challenges for society which this book seeks to address. First, what institutions help care for the victims? Second, what institutions help societies recover from the huge economic devastation caused by mass disease, disability, and death? And finally, how are institutions themselves affected by epidemics? Analysing eight centuries of historical epidemics in Europe, the Middle East, China, India, Africa, and the Americas, economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie investigates how six key social institutions (the market, the state, the community, religion, the guild, and the family) have shaped how people have dealt with the costs of contagion. She demonstrates that fighting epidemics requires resources, coercion, monitoring, exhortation, expertise, and nurturing. Each institution is good at mobilising some of these, but no institution is good at all. A social framework in which multiple institutions coexist has a better chance of tackling the multiplicity of challenges posed by contagion\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Inherited Trust and Growth
This paper develops a new method to uncover the causal effect of trust on economic growth by focusing on the inherited component of trust and its time variation. We show that inherited trust of descendants of US immigrants is significantly influenced by the country of origin and the timing of arrival of their forebears. We thus use the inherited trust of descendants of US immigrants as a time-varying measure of inherited trust in their country of origin. This strategy allows to identify the sizeable causal impact of inherited trust on worldwide growth during the twentieth century by controlling for country fixed effects.
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From the Ptolemies to the Romans : political and economic change in Egypt
\"This book gives a structured account of Egypt's transition from Ptolemaic to Roman rule by identifying key relationships between ecology, land tenure, taxation, administration and politics. It introduces theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and subjects them to empirical scrutiny using data from Greek and Demotic papyri as well as comparative evidence. Although building on recent scholarship, it offers some provocative arguments that challenge prevailing views. For example, patterns of land ownership are linked to population density and are seen as one aspect of continuity between the Ptolemaic and Roman period. Fiscal reform, by contrast, emerges as a significant mechanism of change not only in the agrarian economy but also in the administrative system and the whole social structure. Anyone seeking to understand the impact of Roman rule in the Hellenistic east must consider the well-attested processes in Egypt that this book seeks to explain\"-- Provided by publisher.
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THE LIQUIDITY PREMIUM OF NEAR-MONEY ASSETS
This article examines the link between the opportunity cost of money and time-varying liquidity premia of near-money assets. Higher interest rates imply higher opportunity costs of holding money and hence a higher premium for the liquidity service benefits of assets that are close substitutes for money. Consistent with this theory, short-term interest rates in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada have a strong positive relationship with the liquidity premium of Treasury bills and other near-money assets over periods going back to the 1920s. Once the opportunity cost of money is taken into account, Treasury security supply variables lose their explanatory power for the liquidity premium, except for transitory short-run effects. These findings indicate a high elasticity of substitution between money and near-money assets. As a consequence, a central bank that follows an interest rate operating target not only elastically accommodates and neutralizes shocks to money demand, but effectively also shocks to near-money asset supply and demand.
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The European origins of economic development
Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe during colonization had an enduring effect on economic development, researchers have been unable to assess these predictions directly because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. We construct a new database on the European share of the population during colonization and examine its association with economic development today. We find a strong, positive relation between current income per capita and colonial European settlement that is robust to controlling for the current proportion of the population of European descent, as well as many other country characteristics. The results suggest that any adverse effects of extractive institutions associated with small European settlements were, even at low levels of colonial European settlement, more than offset by other things that Europeans brought, such as human capital and technology.
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Seven Centuries of European Economic Growth and Decline
This paper investigates very long-run preindustrial economic development. New annual GDP per capita data for six European countries over the last seven hundred years paint a clearer picture of the history of European economic development. We confirm that sustained growth has been a recent phenomenon, but reject the argument that there was no long-run growth in living standards before the Industrial Revolution. Instead, the evidence demonstrates the existence of numerous periods of economic growth before the nineteenth century—periods of unsustained, but raising GDP per capita. We also show that many of the economies experienced substantial economic decline. Thus, rather than being stagnant, pre-nineteenth century European economies experienced a great deal of change. Finally, we offer some evidence that, from the nineteenth century, these economies increased the likelihood of being in a phase of economic growth and reduced the risk of being in a phase of economic decline.
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