trade to aid eu s temporary tariff waivers for flood hit pakistan in this paper we study the effectiveness of the first large scale unilateral trade concessions as foreign aid for disaster relief i e eu tariff waivers on goods heavily exported by pakistan which was severely hit by the 2010 floods using a triple difference approach and a synthetic control approach we find that the tariff waivers substantially increased pakistan s exports to the eu the export hike occurred within a few months after the waivers became effective and did not significantly depress exports by competing countries while the export boost brought greater employment opportunities in the tariff waived industries we find little evidence that the greater labor demands from trade were particularly beneficial to the areas most affected by the floods our findings suggest that trade policy may complement traditional means of foreign aid but trade concessions alone may be inadequate as the areas most affected by natural disasters may be poorly targeted

economic dynamics in the malthusian era evidence from the 1609 spanish expulsion of the moriscos we investigate economic dynamics in the malthusian era using the 1609 expulsion of moriscos from spain sharp population declines in former morisco districts were accompanied by decreased output and increased per capita output while these short run results are consistent with standard malthusian predictions malthusian convergence was delayed up to 1786 in former morisco districts archival sources and historical accounts suggest extractive institutions and cultural differences may have contributed to delayed convergence in population and output per capita this historic episode provides an unusually rich setting to examine malthusian dynamics highlighting the potential for sustained differences in per capita output in the malthusian era

the impact of climate on the law of one price a test using north american food prices from the 1920s using grocery price data for over 100 urban locations across the us and canada from the 1920s we show that deviations from the law of one price lop were strongly related to climate differences the effect of climate has a large impact on the elasticity of deviations from lop with respect to distance while having no impact on the border effect we then test a counterfactual to show that the relationship between deviations from lop and temperature does not hold when historical temperature data are replaced with contemporary this is evidence that climate impacts production l impact du climat sur la loi du prix unique un test utilisant les prix de la nourriture en amerique du nord dans les annees 1920 a l aide de donnees sur les prix de la nourriture dans les epiceries dans plus d une centaine de villes aux etats unis et au canada dans les annees 1920 on montre que les deviations par rapport a la loi du prix unique lpu sont fortement reliees aux differences dans le climat l effet du climat a un grand impact sur l elasticite des deviations par rapport a la lpu par rapport a la distance mais aucun impact sur l effet de frontiere on utilise alors un test contrefactuel pour montrer que la relation entre les deviations par rapport a la lpu et la temperature ne tient pas quand on remplace les temperatures historiques par les temperatures contemporaines ceci montre que le climat a un impact sur la production

when does labor scarcity encourage innovation this paper studies whether labor scarcity encourages technological advances that is technology adoption or innovation for example as claimed by habakkuk in the context of nineteenth century united states i define technology as strongly labor saving if technological advances reduce the marginal product of labor and as strongly labor complementary if they increase it i show that labor scarcity encourages technological advances if technology is strongly labor saving and will discourage them if technology is strongly labor complementary i also show that technology can be strongly labor saving in plausible environments but not in many canonical macroeconomic models

the market value of u s government debt monthly 1942 1980 abstract the market value of outstanding united states treasury debt is calculated on a monthly basis using price and par value data from the treasury bulletin separate series for treasury bills bonds certificates of indebtedness notes and total treasury debt are presented along with estimates of privately held treasury debt and gross federal debt the calculated market value series is compared to par value and an existing annual market value series

agricultural productivity and structural transformation evidence from brazil we study the eects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transfor mation to guide empirical work we present a simple model where the eect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change we test the predictions of the model by studying the introduction of genetically engineered soybean seeds in brazil which had heterogeneous eects on agricultural productivity across areas with dierent soil and weather characteristics we nd that technical change in soy production was strongly labor saving and lead to industrial growth as predicted by the model

the rise and decline of general laws of capitalism economists have long been drawn to the ambitious quest of discovering the general laws of capitalism david ricardo for example predicted that capital accumulation would terminate in economic stagnation and inequality as a greater and greater share of national income accrued to landowners karl marx followed him by forecasting the inevitable immiseration of the proletariat thomas piketty s 2014 tome capital in the twenty first century emulates marx in his title his style of exposition and his critique of the capitalist system piketty is after general laws that will demystify our modern economy and elucidate the inherent problems of the system and point to solutions but the quest for general laws of capitalism is misguided because it ignores the key forces shaping how an economy functions the endogenous evolution of technology and of the institutions and the political equilibrium that influence not only technology but also how markets function and how the gains from various different economic arrangements are distributed despite his erudition ambition and creativity marx was led astray because of his disregard of these forces the same is true of piketty s sweeping account of inequality in capitalist economies in the next section we review marx s conceptualization of capitalism and some of his general laws we then turn to piketty s approach to capitalism and his general laws we will point to various problems in piketty s interpretation of the economic relationships underpinning inequality but the most important shortcoming is that

segregated schools and the mobility hypothesis a model of local government discrimination around the turn of the century southern blacks lost the right to vote and discrimination against them by local government officials intensified this paper argues that in the case of the de jure segregated public schools attended by black children the ability of southern blacks to vote with their feet placed limits on local government discrimination

recruitment restrictions and labor markets evidence from the postbellum u s south this article studies the effect of recruitment restrictions on mobility and wages in the postbellum u s south i estimate the effects of criminal fines charged for enticement recruiting workers already under contract on sharecropper mobility tenancy choice and agricultural wages i find that a 13 10 increase in the enticement fine lowered the probability of a move by black sharecroppers by 12 daily wages by 1 cent 1 and the returns to experience for blacks by 0 6 per year these results are consistent with an on the job search model where the enticement fine raises the cost of recruiting an employed worker

the dynamics of structural realignment g overnments render decisions on how resources and values are allocated in a society in the united states congress is the institution in which most of the key allocating decisions are made to the extent the u s political system is integrated the coalitions that form around the issues debated in congress should be reflected in the coalitions that support presidential candidates and those that support the major political parties we formulate a spatial theory of political change in which new ideological cleavages appear in congressional behavior and presidential elections and gradually reorganize the mass party base the theory leads us explicitly to consider the question of realignment and to specify conditions under which the parties will lose support from voters

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

the economics of labor coercion the majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are coercive in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms we propose a tractable principal agent model of coercion based on the idea that coercive activities by employers or guns affect the participation constraint of workers we show that coercion and effort are complements so that coercion increases effort but coercion always reduces utilitarian social welfare better outside options for workers reduce coercion because of the complementarity between coercion and effort workers with a better outside option exert lower effort in equilibrium and thus are coerced less greater demand for labor increases coercion because it increases equilibrium effort we investigate the interaction between outside options market prices and other economic variables by embedding the coercive principal agent relationship in a general equilibrium setup and studying when and how labor scarcity encourages coercion general market equilibrium interactions working through the price of output lead to a positive relationship between labor scarcity and coercion along the lines of ideas suggested by domar while interactions those working through the outside option lead to a negative relationship similar to ideas advanced in neo malthusian historical analyses of the decline of feudalism in net a decline in available labor increases coercion in general equilibrium if and only if its direct partial equilibrium effect is to increase the price of output by more than it increases outside options our model also suggests that markets in slaves make slaves worse off conditional on enslavement and that coercion is more viable in industries that do not require relationship specific investment by workers

a history of mechanization in the cotton south the institutional hypothesis the cotton south has always lagged behind the rest of american agriculture in the use and development of large scale machinery this paper formalizes an idea often found in the historical literature in loosely specified form which argues that the institutional structure of the southern plantation economy caused this technological inertia in particular the institutional hypothesis argues that the annual labor contracts used to secure plantation labor discouraged partial mechanization and inventive activity by redirecting the impact of higher labor costs away from the development and adoption of labor saving machinery and toward the adoption of small unmechanizable tenancies this hypothesis is modeled and supporting evidence is presented its larger implications are also discussed

barbed wire property rights and agricultural development this paper examines the impact on agricultural development of the introduction of barbed wire fencing to the american plains in the late nineteenth century without a fence farmers risked uncompensated damage by others livestock from 1880 to 1900 the introduction and near universal adoption of barbed wire greatly reduced the cost of fences relative to the predominant wooden fences especially in counties with the least woodland over that period counties with the least woodland experienced substantial relative increases in settlement land improvement land values and the productivity and production share of crops most in need of protection this increase in agricultural development appears partly to reflect farmers increased ability to protect their land from encroachment states inability to protect this full bundle of property rights on the frontier beyond providing formal land titles might have otherwise restricted agricultural development

political competition policy and growth theory and evidence from the us this paper develops a simple model to analyse how a lack of political competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth we test the predictions of the model on panel data for the us states in these data we find robust evidence that lack of political competition in a state is associated with anti growth policies higher taxes lower capital spending and a reduced likelihood of using right to work laws we also document a strong link between low political competition and low income growth

coping with economic and environmental shocks institutions and outcomes moving to higher ground migration response to natural disasters in the early twentieth century areas differ in their propensity to experience natural disasters exposure to disaster risks can be reduced either through migration i e self protection or through public infrastructure investment e g building seawalls using migration data from the 1920s and 1930s this paper studies how the population responded to disaster shocks in an era of minimal public investment we find that on net young men move away from areas hit by tornados but are attracted to areas experiencing floods early efforts to protect against future flooding especially during the new deal era of the late 1930s may have counteracted an individual migration response

determining the impact of federal antidiscrimination policy on the economic status of blacks a study of south carolina this paper evaluates alternative explanations for the dramatic increase in black employment in south carolina manufacturing that occurred in the mid 1960s black progress in traditionally segregated sectors of manufacturing in operation at the time jim crow laws were passed cannot be attributed to tight labor markets the decline of agriculture or the growth of education of the black workforce the only plausible explanation is federal government civil rights and affirmative action policy for newer industries that entered the state on a large scale after world war ii the growth of skills among blacks accounts for black economic progress copyright 1989 by american economic association

the long reach of cotton in the us south tenant farming mechanization and low skill manufacturing abstract this paper examines the long run impact of cotton agriculture on local development in the us south focusing on a novel aspect of structural change exploiting climate based variation in cotton production i show that cotton specialization in the late 19th century had a negative impact on local development that lasts through 2010 this negative relationship however only became evident in the second half of the 20th century i argue that the change was caused by the mechanization of cotton production which began in the 1950s after the mechanization local manufacturing absorbed displaced cotton tenants with low human capital in response to the inflow of cotton tenants labor productivity in manufacturing began to decline and the effects persisted in the long run the persistent decline in manufacturing productivity is explained by directed technical change that reduced demand for skills in manufacturing these results indicate that depending on the agricultural background structural change can negatively affect the evolution of technology and productivity in the industrial sector

coercive contract enforcement law and the labor market in 19th century industrial britain british master and servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875 we develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions positive shocks in the textile iron and coal industries increased prosecutions following the abolition of criminal sanctions wages differentially rose in counties that had experienced more prosecutions and wages responded more to labor demand shocks coercive contract enforcement was applied in industrial britain restricted mobility allowed workers to commit to risk sharing contracts with lower but less volatile wages

when the levee breaks black migration and economic development in the american south abstract in the american south postbellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners access to low wage black labor this paper examines the impact of the great mississippi flood of 1927 on black out migration and subsequent agricultural development flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out migration of black population over time landowners in flooded counties modernized agricultural production and increased its capital intensity relative to landowners in nearby similar non flooded counties landowners resisted black out migration however benefiting from the status quo system of labor intensive agricultural production jel j15 j43 n32 n52 n92 q54 r23

the demonstration effect of transactions between strangers on those between acquaintances evidence from land rentals in rural china over the last decade introducing outer village lessees has been an important approach to increasing the marketization of land rentals in rural china however with large numbers of informal featur

information the dual economy and development we examine the interactions between different institutional arrangements in a general equilibrium model of a modernizing economy there is a modern sector where productivity is high but information asymmetries are large and a traditional sector where productivity is low but information asymmetries are small consequently agency costs in the modern sector make consumption lending difficult while such lending is readily done in the traditional sector the resulting trade off between credit availability and productivity implies that not everyone will move to the modern sector in fact the laissez faire level of modernization may fail to maximize net social surplus this situation may also hold in the long run in a dynamic version of the model a trickle down effect links the process of modernization with reduction in modern sector agency costs this effect may be too weak and the economy may get stuck in a trap and never fully modernize the two sector structure also yields a natural theoretical testing ground for the kuznets inverted u hypothesis we show that even within the sectoral shifting class of models this phenomenon is not robust to small changes in model specification