“Rural-Urban Migration and Socioeconomic Mobility in Victorian England” Jason Long

Abstract:  Victorian Britain experienced the most rapid and thorough urbanization the world had yet seen. This study addresses two related questions: Who were the rural-urban migrants, and what were the returns to migration? I answer these questions using a new dataset of 28,000 individuals matched between the 1851 and 1881 population censuses and a structural econometric model that controls for the endogeneity of the migration decision. I find that urban migrants were positively selected: their prospects in both the urban and rural labor markets were superior to the persisters. Also, the treatment effect of urban migration was large and positive across socioeconomic strata. People who moved to the city were more successful in improving their socioeconomic status than they would have been had they remained in rural areas. Llink to paper: http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/long/ruralurban.pdf

“Instituion Building and Financial Market Unification: Italy 1863-19O5” Leandro Conte, Gianni Toniolo, and Giovanni Vecchi

Abstract:  Does history offer any clue as to why, three years after the introduction of the single currency, EMU financial markets are not yet fully integrated? The paper investigates a previous case of financial market integration following monetary unification, that of Italy after 1863. The prices of the Rendita Italiana 5% (Italian Consols) across regional stock exchanges did not fully converge until 1886-87, twenty five years after de jure monetary unification.  Variables such as communication costs, trade volumes and the diffusion of the ‘ single currency’ fail to explain the delay in financial market unification.  We argue that markets remained relatively fragmented because of powerful vested interests resisting the legal and regulatory changes needed to make arbitrage across individual stock exchanges efficient.  A single Italian financial market appeared only when the State was able to regulate markets nationwide. Link to paper: http://www.economia.uniroma2.it/dei/membri/toniolo/WorkinProg.htm

“Who Protects? World Experience Since 1870” Jeffrey G. Williamson

Abstract:  A new world-wide database establishes that protection was associated in both the European industrial core and in their English-speaking offshoots with fast growth before World War II, while it was associated with slow growth thereafter. However, protection was always associated with slow growth in the European, Latin American and Asian periphery. The asymmetry between center and periphery supports the standard critique of free trade for primary producers, and the sign switch in the core plus offshoots is explained by a changing world economic environment. Having dealt with the issue of tariff impact, the paper then explores what other reasons countries might have for protection – e.g. government revenue needs, Stolper-Samuelson lobbying, suffrage, strategic terms of trade policy, declining transport costs offsets – and why those reasons might have changed in the century after 1870. Link to paper: http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/jwilliam/papers/Tariffs_Dublin.pdf

Page by Meredith Beechey
Prepared  07/18/02