Across Time and Space
What Really Happened During the Glorious Revolution?
Steven Pincus & James Robinson
NBER Working Paper, July 2011
Abstract:
The English Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 is one of the most famous instances of ‘institutional' change in world history which has fascinated scholars because of the role it may have played in creating an environment conducive to making England the first industrial nation. This claim was most forcefully advanced by North and Weingast yet the existing literature in history and economic history dismisses their arguments. In this paper we argue that North and Weingast were entirely correct in arguing that the Glorious Revolution represented a critical change in institutions. In addition, and contrary to the claims of many historians, most of the things they claimed happened, for example parliamentary sovereignty, did happen. However, we argue that they happened for reasons different from those put forward by North and Weingast. We show that rather than being an instance of a de jure ‘re-writing the rules', as North and Weingast argued, the Glorious Revolution was actually an interlinked series of de facto institutional changes which came from a change in the balance of power and authority and was part of a broader reorientation in the political equilibrium of England. Moreover, it was significant for the economy not because it solved a problem of credible commitment, but for two other reasons. First, because the institutional changes it led to meant that party political ministries, rather than the king's private advisors, now initiated policy. Second, because these ministries were dominated by Whigs with a specific program of economic modernization.
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Dov Cohen & Angela K.-y. Leung
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In many honor cultures, honor as martial honor and honor as character/integrity are often both subsumed under the banner of honor. In nonhonor cultures, these qualities are often separable. The present study examines political elites, revealing that Presidents, Congresspeople, and Supreme Court Justices from the Southern United States with a greater commitment to martial honor (as indexed by their military service) also show more integrity, character, and moral leadership. This relationship, however, does not hold for nonsoutherners. The present studies illustrate the need to examine both between-culture differences in cultural logics (as these logics connect various behaviors under a common ideal) and within-culture differences (as individuals rise to meet these cultural ideals or not).
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The Phantom of the Opera: Cultural Amenities, Human Capital, and Regional Economic Growth
Oliver Falck, Michael Fritsch & Stephan Heblich
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a part of rulers' competition for prestigious cultural sights. Robustness tests confirm our strategy and strengthen the finding that proximity to a baroque opera house significantly affects the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. A cross-region growth regression shows that these employees induce local knowledge spillovers and shift a location to a higher growth path.
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The "Out of Africa" Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development
Quamrul Ashraf & Oded Galor
NBER Working Paper, July 2011
Abstract:
This research argues that deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the contemporary era. It advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance from the cradle of humankind to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had a long-lasting effect on the pattern of comparative economic development that is not captured by geographical, institutional, and cultural factors. In particular, the level of genetic diversity within a society is found to have a hump-shaped effect on development outcomes in both the pre-colonial and the modern era, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity. While the intermediate level of genetic diversity prevalent among Asian and European populations has been conducive for development, the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions.
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A Cross-National Test of the Uncertainty Hypothesis of Religious Belief
Nigel Barber
Cross-Cultural Research, August 2011, Pages 318-333
Abstract:
According to the uncertainty hypothesis, religion helps people cope psychologically with dangerous or unpredictable situations. Conversely, with greater control over the external environment due to economic development and technological advances, religious belief is predicted to decline (the existential security hypothesis). The author predicts that religious belief would decline in economically developed countries where there is greater existential security, including income security (income equality and redistribution via welfare states) and improved health. These predictions are tested in regression analyses of 137 countries that partialed out the effects of Communism and Islamic religion both of which affect the incidence of reported nonbelief. Findings show that disbelief in God increased with economic development (measured by lower agricultural employment and third-level enrollment). Findings further show that disbelief also increased with income security (low Gini coefficient, high personal taxation tapping the welfare state) and with health security (low pathogen prevalence). Results show that religious belief declines as existential security increases, consistent with the uncertainty hypothesis.
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Jared Rubin
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why was economic development retarded in the Middle East relative to Western Europe, despite the Middle East being far ahead for centuries? A theoretical model inspired and substantiated by the history of interest restrictions suggests that this outcome emanates in part from the greater degree to which early Islamic political authorities derived legitimacy from religious authorities. This entailed a feedback mechanism in Europe in which the rise of commerce led to the relaxation of interest restrictions while also diminishing the Church's ability to legitimise political authorities. These interactions did not occur in the Islamic world despite equally amenable economic conditions.
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Charles Thomson and the First American New Testament
Ramsey Michaels
Harvard Theological Review, July 2011, Pages 349-365
Abstract:
Charles Thomson (1729-1824) is best known as the first translator of the Septuagint, or Greek Old Testament, into English - or for that matter into any modern language. He is less well known as the first American translator of the New Testament, for his four volumes included the New Testament as well as the Old. His achievements are remarkable, for he was no professional scholar but a layman - early American patriot, Secretary to the Continental Congress, and friend of Thomas Jefferson - who taught himself Greek in order to carry out the task. Born in Ireland in 1729, he arrived in America as an orphan at the age of ten, learned Latin, went into business, and became an activist in resisting the repressive measures of the British government, particularly the Stamp Act.
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Still different after all these years: Solidarity behavior in East and West Germany
Jeannette Brosig et al.
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using data from laboratory experiments, we find that East Germans show consistently less solidarity than West Germans; there has been no convergence in the 20 years after the reunification. While it has recently been estimated that political values converge 20 to 40 years after the reunification (Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln, 2007), we conclude from our findings that social behavior changes more slowly than political values. We hypothesize that this is due to complementarities involved in individual social behavior and the necessity to coordinate on social norms on the society level.
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Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa
Stelios Michalopoulos & Elias Papaioannou
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization and regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite light density at night. We exploit the fact that political boundaries across the African landscape partitioned ethnic groups in different countries subjecting identical cultures to different country-level institutions. Our regression discontinuity estimates reveal that differences in countrywide institutional arrangements across the border do not explain differences in economic performance within ethnic groups. In contrast, we document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic institutional traits and contemporary regional development. While this correlation does not necessarily identify a causal relationship, this result obtains conditional on country fixed-effects, controlling for other ethnic traits and when we focus on pairs of contiguous ethnic homelands.
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Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences
Heng Li & Richard Durbin
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
The history of human population size is important for understanding human evolution. Various studies1, 2, 3, 4, 5 have found evidence for a founder event (bottleneck) in East Asian and European populations, associated with the human dispersal out-of-Africa event around 60 thousand years (kyr) ago. However, these studies have had to assume simplified demographic models with few parameters, and they do not provide a precise date for the start and stop times of the bottleneck. Here, with fewer assumptions on population size changes, we present a more detailed history of human population sizes between approximately ten thousand and a million years ago, using the pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent model applied to the complete diploid genome sequences of a Chinese male (YH)6, a Korean male (SJK)7, three European individuals (J. C. Venter8, NA12891 and NA12878 (ref. 9)) and two Yoruba males (NA18507 (ref. 10) and NA19239). We infer that European and Chinese populations had very similar population-size histories before 10-20 kyr ago. Both populations experienced a severe bottleneck 10-60 kyr ago, whereas African populations experienced a milder bottleneck from which they recovered earlier. All three populations have an elevated effective population size between 60 and 250 kyr ago, possibly due to population substructure11. We also infer that the differentiation of genetically modern humans may have started as early as 100-120 kyr ago12, but considerable genetic exchanges may still have occurred until 20-40 kyr ago.
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Amanda Mummert et al.
Economics & Human Biology, July 2011, Pages 284-301
Abstract:
The population explosion that followed the Neolithic revolution was initially explained by improved health experiences for agriculturalists. However, empirical studies of societies shifting subsistence from foraging to primary food production have found evidence for deteriorating health from an increase in infectious and dental disease and a rise in nutritional deficiencies. In Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (Cohen and Armelagos, 1984), this trend towards declining health was observed for 19 of 21 societies undergoing the agricultural transformation. The counterintuitive increase in nutritional diseases resulted from seasonal hunger, reliance on single crops deficient in essential nutrients, crop blights, social inequalities, and trade. In this study, we examined the evidence of stature reduction in studies since 1984 to evaluate if the trend towards decreased health after agricultural transitions remains. The trend towards a decrease in adult height and a general reduction of overall health during times of subsistence change remains valid, with the majority of studies finding stature to decline as the reliance on agriculture increased. The impact of agriculture, accompanied by increasing population density and a rise in infectious disease, was observed to decrease stature in populations from across the entire globe and regardless of the temporal period during which agriculture was adopted, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and North America.
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American Incomes before and after the Revolution
Peter Lindert & Jeffrey Williamson
NBER Working Paper, July 2011
Abstract:
Building social tables in the tradition of Gregory King, we quantify the level and inequality of American incomes before and after the Revolutionary War. Our tentative estimates suggest that between 1774 and 1800 American incomes fell in real per capita terms. The colonial South was richer, and then suffered a greater Revolutionary decline, than suggested by previous estimates. Any rapid growth after 1790 seems to have just partially offset part of a very steep wartime decline. We also find that free American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales. Indeed, New England and the Middle Colonies appear to have been more egalitarian than anywhere else in the measurable world. The colonists also had greater purchasing power than their English counterparts over all of the income ranks except in the top few percent.
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Max-Stephan Schulze & Nikolaus Wolf
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article seeks to square two seemingly contradictory strands in the literature on economic development in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. On the one hand, there is an extensive historiography stressing the rise of nationalism and its close correlate of growing efforts to organize economic life along ethno-linguistic lines. On the other, there is a substantial body of research that emphasizes significant improvements in market integration across the empire as an outcome of the diffusion of industrialization and an expanding railway network, among other factors. In this article, it is argued that the process of market integration was systematically asymmetric, shaped by intensifying intra-empire nationality conflicts. While grain markets in Austria-Hungary became overall more integrated over time, they also became systematically biased: regions with a similar ethno-linguistic composition of their population came to display significantly smaller price gaps between each other than regions with different compositions. The emergence and persistence of this differential integration cannot be explained by changes in infrastructure and transport costs, simple geographical features, asymmetric integration with neighbouring regions abroad, or communication problems. Instead, differential market integration along ethno-linguistic lines was driven by the formation of ethno-linguistic networks due to intensifying conflict between groups-economic nationalism mattered.
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British relative economic decline revisited: The role of competition
Nicholas Crafts
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically.
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Economic Growth in the Mid Atlantic Region: Conjectural Estimates for 1720 to 1800
Peter Mancall, Joshua Rosenbloom & Thomas Weiss
NBER Working Paper, July 2011
Abstract:
We employ the conjectural approach to estimate the growth of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the mid-Atlantic region (Del., NJ, NY and Penn). In contrast to previous studies of the region's growth that relied heavily on the performance of the export sector, the conjectural method enables us to take into account the impact of domestic sector, in particular the production of agricultural products for the domestic market. We find that the region experienced modest growth of real GDP per capita. Although the rate of growth was modest in comparison to what would materialize in the late nineteenth century, it was faster than that of the Lower South in the eighteenth century, and at times as fast as that for the U.S. in the first half of the nineteenth century. In its heyday of growth from 1740 to 1750 - before the dislocations produced by the spread of the Seven Years' War -- real GDP per capita rose at 0.7 percent per year, driven by the growth of output per worker in both agriculture and nonagriculture, and by capital accumulation.
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R.C. Allen & J.L. Weisdorf
Economic History Review, August 2011, Pages 715-729
Abstract:
It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious' revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious' revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.