Graduate Economic History Seminars 2025-26

Winter Term 2025-26

Time: Wednesdays 1-3pm

Venue: SAL.LG.04

Lunch will be provided

21 January

• Marco Cokic
• Picking Winners? Trade and Investment Policy in Socialist Eastern Europe
• Abstract: Industrial policy has re-emerged globally, inspired by East Asia’s success and renewed initiatives in the United States and Europe. Yet the Cold War experience of Eastern Europe offers an overlooked cautionary case. Picking Winners analyses the industrialisation strategies of Eastern Bloc economies to examine how state-directed investment shaped trade performance and competitiveness. Using a new dataset combining primary and secondary sources, the study finds that investment was heavily concentrated in industrial sectors irrespective of comparative advantage, leading to convergent export structures and weak regional integration. While higher investment-to-capital ratios temporarily boosted trade, these effects quickly reversed, suggesting misallocation rather than underinvestment. A sectoral analysis of Yugoslavia confirms that only investments aligned with comparative advantage enhanced exports. By linking trade and investment, the paper contributes to research on Socialist economic history and modern industrial policy, highlighting the persistent risks of centralised allocation and the importance of incentive-compatible investment strategies.

28 January

• Tiarnán Heaney
• From Pension's to Pupils? Schooling, Resource Constraints, and Old Age Pensions in Ireland 1901–11
• Abstract: Can cash transfers given to the elderly improve school enrolments in poor multigenerational households? I answer this question by studying the 1908 Old Age Pension and school enrolments in Ireland, using individual-level data from the 1901 and 1911 censuses, new income estimates, and a difference-in-difference framework. As one of the poorest polities of the UK, Ireland emerged as the greatest beneficiary of the policy: pension claims per capita were three times higher than in Great Britain, the programme accounted for a fifth of Irish public expenditure, and boosted average household incomes by nearly 5 percentage points. As the policy was financed primarily through tax revenues raised in Great Britain, the Old Age Pension represents a substantial, and plausibly exogenous transfer of wealth across the Irish sea. This setting provides a unique natural experiment of history to explore the effect of a cash transfer programme that did not target children, within a low income and highly gendered context. My findings show that children that co-resided with a pensioner increased the likelihood of school enrolment, but these effects differed by the gender of the child and pension claimant. Boys benefited most overall, especially from poorer households. For girls, enrolments rose in the poorest households when the elderly claimant was female but declined in the wealthiest households when the recipient was male. In these households, the decline in female enrolment is accompanied by a corresponding rise in the number of girls reporting no occupation, indicating a likely transition from schooling into domestic work. Overall, these results suggests that while cash transfers can reduce the opportunity costs of schooling and increase enrolments, gender-norms and intra-household bargaining processes can lead to households favouring boys over girls.

04 February

• Marcel Caesmann
• Getting Religion: Identity Formation in the Protestant Reformation
• Abstract: This paper examines how new identity markers emerge, spread, and define enduring social boundaries. I study Reformation Germany (1480–1806) using 4.9 million baptismal names from 2,210 towns to trace how families expressed religious affiliation through naming choices. Naming remained nearly identical across Catholics and Protestants for decades after 1517 but diverged sharply from 1580 onward, stabilizing by 1618. Church enforcement strengthened local identities, while social learning and conformity spread them across space. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design around Jesuit and Protestant college foundings—complemented by counterfactual placements and visitation records—I show a strong link between institutional presence and local alignment. Applying a DeGroot model of learning with spatial-lag specifications, I show that towns updated their naming toward locally shared beliefs and prevailing norms, producing lasting cultural and economic divides.

11 February

• Kunal Panda
• The Negative Effects of Colonisation on the Local Population: Evidence from Morocco
• Abstract: What is the welfare effect of colonial agriculture on the colonized population? There could be a growth effect spurred by modernization, or a redistribution of production factors in favor of colonists, which could worsen native well-being. We investigate these two channels in French Morocco (1912-1956), a settlement colony. We use a novel individual dataset of Moroccan soldiers born around the onset of colonization with granular information on place of birth, intra- and inter-generational migrational choices. We estimate the effect of being born near a colonial farm on adult height-per-age, a proxy for early-life conditions. A difference-in-difference strategy indicates that cohorts exposed to colonial farms grew up to be shorter by 10 percent of a standard deviation of height-for-age. To address spatial sorting, we exploit the staggered attribution of colonial land via a public auction program, using never-attributed plots as counterfactuals. We find evidence of a redistributive channel, whereby the height loss is driven by a diversion of agricultural inputs, namely land and water, resulting in reduced local productivity. Suggestively, in the long run, the height effect is not persistent among post-independence cohorts. However, we find delayed industrialisation and increased insecurity in agricultural land ownership. These results shed new light on the colonial determinants of structural change in developing countries.

18 February

• Marius Gunnesmo
• Overcrowding and mortality: the effects of Danish housing associations
• Abstract: I look at what effects the roll-out of Danish co-operative housing associations had on the apartment stock, overcrowding, and a set of health outcomes in 87 Danish cities in the first half of the 20th century. The housing associations increased the number of apartments and reduced overcrowding. But the effect on mortality is less clear. Mortality from some infectious diseases decreased, but it was completely unaffected for other infectious diseases.

04 March

• Viren Mahurkar
• Innovation Financing Challenges for Three Biotech Startups at the Dawn of the 1980s New High-Tech Era
• Abstract: Emerging scholarship places private startups based on publicly funded basic science at the heart of post-WWII US innovation and productivity growth. However, the actual private financing experience of such early companies is understood very little: a gap that I address in this paper. I undertake case studies of the financing experience of three such public science based private startups - Hybritech, Biogen and Genzyme - within the newly emerging biotech industry of the 1980s, a period regarded as a major technological turning point, marked by pro-innovation public policies and sophisticated formal financing mechanisms such as venture capital and capital markets. By drawing upon physical archives, oral history archives, newspaper reports and commentaries by principals, I find that the formal financial system provided only limited, inconsistent support. I find instead that wealthy individuals, surpluses from stagnating non-related older industries, self-financing from non-core revenues and certain regulatory externalities played a crucial role in the early financing of these companies. Since raising productivity through high-tech companies has returned to the center-stage of current public policy discussions, these findings from early biotech financing offer valuable historical insights.

11 March

• Valeria Peshko
• Who Owned Moscow? Gender Asset Gap in a 19th Century Metropolis
• Abstract: The gender asset gap—the disparity in wealth and asset ownership between men and women—has been widely studied in contemporary contexts, yet its historical evolution remains underexplored. This paper investigates gendered patterns of real estate ownership and income in late 19th-century Moscow, a setting where women’s property rights were legally recognized, and inheritance was partible. Using newly compiled data from property revenue assessments for 1875, 1890, and 1900, covering over 50,000 observations, the study captures a period of rapid urbanization and persistent housing shortages, when real estate was a key wealth component. I find that women represented more than 40 of property owners, and their share within the overall population was broadly comparable to that of men, however, it declined more sharply during the studied period. Despite this, income disparities were substantial: women earned 28–35 less than men, with the gap most pronounced in the top decile. Two-way fixed-effects regressions confirm a persistent male premium even after controlling for social status, prominent business roles, political office, and number of landholdings. Spatial analysis shows women-owned properties were evenly distributed across affluent and poorer neighbourhoods, challenging the notion that men simply acquired more valuable assets. Instead, evidence suggests men were more effective at enhancing property income. A staggered differences-in-differences design reveals that properties acquired by men generated 9% higher revenue post-transfer, likely due to their ability to undertake large-scale construction projects. By introducing the concept of a “patriarchal inequality regime”, this paper highlights how economic rights without political power created conditions for male wealth accumulation and sustained gendered inequality.

18 March

• Daniel Sanchez-Ordonez
• (Un-)Persistent Conflict? The Effects of First Globalization Coffee Boom in Colombia
• Abstract: This paper examines the determinants and persistence of civil conflict using a new municipality-level dataset from Colombia covering the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century civil war, La Violencia (1948–1965). I combine newly digitized archival records on violent deaths, historical coffee production, and political and demographic characteristics to study how economic shocks shape the geography and intensity of conflict over time. The analysis centers on the First Globalization period, when a coffee export boom reallocated production across space, shifting the agricultural frontier. While the incidence of civil conflict is widespread and persistent across Colombian history, I document that the intensity of violence during La Violencia shifted sharply toward new coffee-producing regions. I show that coffee cultivation generated highly appropriable rents, which enabled the emergence and persistence of economic banditry. Municipalities with greater coffee production hosted more bandit leaders and larger bandit groups, sustaining higher levels of violence during the conflict. These findings provide new evidence on the economic origins of civil conflict and contribute to debates on persistence by showing how large commodity shocks can overturn historical patterns, reshaping both the location and mechanisms of violence over time.

25 March

• Zoey Shen
• Beyond the “Silver Sink”: Markets and the Monetization of Silver in Ming-Qing China
• Abstract: Why did China absorb unprecedented quantities of silver in the early modern era, and which actors transformed silver from a traded commodity into a widely accepted monetary medium? This paper intervenes in longstanding interpretations that depict China as a passive “silver sink” in the global silver trade by foregrounding the internal dynamics that underpinned its monetary transformation. The analysis identifies a systematic divergence between state policy and market practice. It highlights the pivotal yet underappreciated role of merchants. Despite their low formal status in late imperial China, merchants actively promoted the monetisation of silver by expanding its use in exchange and as a unit of account. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from official and private Chinese and Japanese sources, the paper reconstructs how merchants facilitated the monetization of silver in a context where the state faced persistent constraints in maintaining a stable and unified currency regime. Rather than leading monetary change, the state struggled to enforce coherence, while market actors coordinated around silver as a flexible and credible medium. By reinterpreting China’s silver demand as the outcome of merchant-led monetary change, the paper contributes to global monetary history and the Great Divergence debate, demonstrating how markets can generate and sustain monetary regimes under conditions of limited state capacity.

01 April

• Christian Nielsen
• Nielsen & Schaffalitzky de Muckadell: Surnames & Social Mobility in Denmark, 1750-2020
• Abstract: Conventional measures of social mobility, such as intergenerational income elasticity, suggest that Denmark is one of if not the most socially mobile country in the world. This is often attributed to Denmark’s low economic inequality and generous social welfare policies. Using surname methods that reduce biases of conventional measures, I conversely show strong persistence of social status in Denmark from 1750 to 2020. I estimate rates of social mobility utilizing changes in the relative representation of surnames in elite occupations and education (doctors, lawyers, members of parliament and high school graduates). This strong persistence is expressed both in slow upward mobility of lower-status individuals (carriers of patronymic surnames) and slow downward mobility of upper-status individuals (carriers of noble surnames), suggesting an underlying persistence rate of 0.7-0.8. The rate is surprisingly similar to other countries with different institutional setups, and fairly stable over the full period, with only minor decreases, despite significant economic, social and political changes in Denmark, including the abolition of serfdom, democratization and the introduction of the social welfare state.

Autumn Term 2025-26

Time: Wednesdays 1-3pm

Venue: KSW.212 (Week 3 will be in CKK 107, 12-2.30pm)

Weeks 4-10: MAR.110

Lunch will be provided

01 October

• Noah Sutter (LSE)
• The Grub Street Origins of the Revolution Results - Did the Reforms of the Publishing Trade in the 1770s have an effect on illegal publishing? Evidence from the FBTEE Data
• Abstract: TBC

08 October

• Avi Moorthy (Harvard University)
• The Defender on the Move: Black Newspapers and the Great Migration
• Abstract: After 50 years of limited migration following emancipation, 1.5 million Black southerners made the journey north during the First Great Migration from 1915 to 1940. Over the same period, Black political organization in the South surged and racial violence fell. I examine whether information on northern life and jobs sparked Black migration and southern activism using quasi-random variation in exposure to the Chicago Defender, the most prominent northern Black newspaper. Classifying the coverage of thousands of southern newspapers, I show that information about the North was limited prior to the Chicago Defender's entry in the mid-1910s. To reach southern readers, the Chicago Defender partnered with Black railway porters working for the Illinois Central railroad. In cities along the railroad, I find that individuals who lived near a porter selling the Chicago Defender were 33% more likely to migrate north than similar individuals who did not. These individuals pulled relatives to migrate, consistent with information diffusion across social networks, and moved to cities that received more coverage in articles, ads, and job postings. Counties with access to the Chicago Defender were 1.5 times more likely to form an NAACP branch and experienced half as many lynchings.

15 October (Week 3 will be in CKK 107, 12-2.30pm)

• Deirdre McCloskey
• The Prudent and Faithful English Peasant: An Essay in Historical Humanomics
• Professor McCloskey's book a is a full and much-supplemented reprise of her early writings on English open fields and enclosures. Selected chapters will be circulated.

22 October

• Luisa Bicalho-Ritzkat (LSE)
• Painted Lemons: Evidence from the Art Market on Credibility of Information
• Abstract: This paper provides causal evidence on how the credibility of expert information affects price formation and market efficiency. I develop a signalling model, adapted to the art market, in which privately informed intermediaries decide whether to verify authorship, and low credibility leads attributions to lose their informational value, resulting in a pooled “lemons” equilibrium. I exploit an unforeseen legal change in 1836 Britain that introduced legal liability for false claims about authorship, exogenously increasing the credibility of attributions. After the reform, named-artist works sold for up to 76% more, and high-quality works became more likely to sell. These effects were concentrated where authenticity was most uncertain, and muted for Christie’s, whose reputation already conveyed credibility. The findings show that credibility is essential for information to drive market segmentation and efficient pricing, with important implications for today.

29 October

• Alice Calder (UNSW Sydney)
• One Question at a Time: The Impact of the American Civil War on Mobilization for Women's Suffrage
• Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of the American Civil War on mobilization for women’s suffrage in the US. I construct a new dataset of soldiers enlisted in the Union army and their wartime experience, and locate them to their town of residence. Leveraging variation in casualty rates, I show that people from towns with more casualties were less likely to petition for women’s suffrage in the following years. Consistent with a narrative that major events such as the Civil War can reallocate limited political attention and capacity, elevating some causes, while sidelining others. I find evidence of two possible mechanisms through which casualty rates drive these results. Firstly, Northern towns with higher casualties were more attune to the salience of Black rights, which the Civil War was fought over, resulting in a prioritization of this movement over women's suffrage. Secondly, the collective trauma of casualties resulted in a tightening of pre-war gender norms of separate spheres that were not welcoming of female political empowerment.

12 November

• Taylan Alpkaya (University of Mannheim)
• Legacy of Servitude: Long Run Intergenerational Mobility in the US
• Abstract:This paper presents the first estimates of intergenerational mobility in the United States before the Civil War. I investigate the long-term socioeconomic trajectories of descendants of English convicts transported to America between 1718 and 1775. I digitize a novel dataset comprising 47,000 individuals sentenced to transportation, including names, transportation dates, sentence lengths, destinations, and sentencing locations in England. Without direct genealogical linkages, I employ surname-based methods to trace individuals across generations. I utilize the early household head censuses of 1790 and 1810 to construct the distribution of surnames in early America and estimate the probability that an individual descends from a transported convict, conditional on their surname. My findings indicate that, relative to the average native-born white American in 1850, having a convict ancestor is associated with a 9 lower probability of owning real estate—the earliest available wealth measure in U.S. censuses. It is also linked to a 22 lower likelihood of being the head of a household and a striking 57 increase in the probability of being illiterate. This pattern is robust across censuses from 1850 to 1870. The disadvantage persisted well into the twentieth century: in 1940, descendants of convicts were still 7 less likely to own a home and 11% less likely to have non-wage income, but surprisingly, slightly better educated. As a second step, I also digitize a dataset of 100,000 colonial migrants. I find similar results for descendants of indentured servants who arrived in America during the same period, but null results for free immigrants, indicating the channel of persistence might be wealth transmission. I conduct several robustness checks, including placebo surname treatments, analyses restricted to records of female convicts (who could not transmit their surnames), and examinations of nineteenth-century British emigrants with the same surnames as convicts. All tests yield null effects.

19 November

• Andres Irarrázaval García Huidobro (LSE)
• How Much Can Elites Take? Subsistence Constraints, Surplus Distribution, and the Limits of Income Inequality
• Abstract: How much can elites extract? In poor countries, about 50% of national income is tied to subsistence and therefore cannot feasibly flow to the top 1%. However, most studies ignore this hard constraint on income concentration. Extending Milanovic et al. (2011), I set a subsistence floor and derive the maximum feasible top 1% share, distinguishing extractable from non-extractable income. I then adjust for how this inequality frontier rises with economic growth: income above the subsistence floor expands and so does the scope for extraction by elites. This enables meaningful top 1% share comparisons across countries and time. Using long-run data, I document three findings. First, historical slave-based economies —theoretically the most extractive—cluster near the predicted inequality frontier (i.e., maximum feasible top 1% share), while today's democracies lie far below. Second, in poor countries, despite similar top 1% income shares to rich countries (16-17%), the top 1% holds 42% of feasibly extractable income —they sit 2.5 times closer to the inequality frontier. Third, while the world’s top 1% income share rose from 17% in 1820 to 18% today, their share of feasibly extractable income fell from 43% in 1820, to 35% in 1900, and 21% today. Growth has radically liberated income from subsistence, yet elites have captured a declining share of this rising surplus. The rise of top 1% income shares masks a fundamental transformation: from a world where most live at subsistence and elites extracted nearly all of society’s surplus, to one where economic freedom —the ability to meet needs beyond mere subsistence, stressed by Sen— has been greatly equalized.

26 November

• Junxi Liu (Warwick)
• Battles and Prizes꞉ Evidence from the British Museum
• Abstract: This study provides a quantitative analysis of systematic looting during colonial wars, focusing on the British Museum's acquisition patterns. By compiling a novel city-level dataset of over 1.17 million artifacts acquired before 1950 and merging it with historical battle data, the research investigates the relationship between British military conflicts and the subsequent inflow of cultural artifacts to the museum. Using Poisson regression models and an event study approach, the analysis controls for city and year fixed effects to isolate the impact of conflict. The results demonstrate a significant increase in artifacts arriving from a battle city in the year immediately following a military engagement. This pattern of targeted extraction was particularly pronounced in Asia and Africa and in regions with high historical state capacity, indicating organized and expert-led looting.

03 December

• John Zhang (LSE)
• Deskilling and Unrest
• Abstract: Does deskilling cause unrest? I study this question in the context of the First Industrial Revolution in England, using parish-level data on the adoption of skill-saving machines and social unrest events, collected by applying generative AI to transcriptions of digitised contemporaneous newspaper pages. Reduced-form analysis finds a causal effect of skill-saving mechanisation on increasing the equilibrium likelihood of social unrest, which is moderated when skill-saving mechanisation exhibits labour-reinstatement effects and is exacerbated when labour market institutions for peaceful collective bargaining are weakened.

10 December

• Marielle Côte-Gendreau (Princeton)
• Multigenerational and gender-symmetric transmission of migration behaviors in a historical context
• Abstract: Migration decisions are embedded in social and family trajectories that escape traditional data sources, which tend to observe individuals in isolation. Genealogical microdata now make it possible to trace these dynamics over long time horizons. This paper documents how prior generations' migration histories shape future internal migration behavior, leveraging rich historical microdata spanning over two centuries and multiple generations at the scale of a full population (Quebec, Canada; 1621-1861). Using a novel dataset of residential trajectories that I reconstructed from linked vital data, I focus on the migratory trajectories of couples during the twenty years following their marriage, examining them in relation to their parents and grandparents' behaviors in the same life stage. I show that mobility depends on parents' and grandparents' migration histories, with descendants of migratory people being more likely to migrate themselves. The impact of ascendants in the grandparental generation is about half that of the parental generation. Moreover, husbands' and wives' migration backgrounds are equally predictive of their joint mobility decisions, suggesting a substantial role of women in shaping couples' mobility and challenging the conventional assumption that migration decisions were historically made by men. These results reveal deep family history as an underexplored axis of migrant selection. The long-lasting influence of family should be integrated in migration theories.