Prelims

Half Title Page

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

Series Page

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

Series Editors: Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott

Title Page

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY VOLUME 35

RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

EDITED BY

CHRISTOPHER HANES

Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA

SUSAN WOLCOTT

Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2019

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78973-304-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78973-303-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78973-305-1 (Epub)

ISSN: 0363-3268 (Series)

Introduction

Research in Economic History is a refereed journal, specializing in economic history, in the form of a book. We publish articles that follow the standard formats of economics journals, but we can also accommodate longer pieces, historical narratives, and articles that primarily present newly-constructed data sets.

In this volume, Kim Abildgren estimates the effect of changes in relative prices on the distribution of real household income in Denmark during the Great Depression, 1930 to 1935.

Ranjit S. Dighe argues for the importance of expository editorials in the then new magazine, Business Week, in spreading awareness of and gaining acceptance for Keynesian policies among US business elites.

Howard Bodenhorn, Timothy W. Guinnane, and Thomas A. Mroz note that while many existing studies use data on heights to study historical living standards, most historical height data come from special sub-populations such as volunteer soldiers, who may not have been typical of the general population because of selection bias. Apparent differences in heights across time and across place may reflect selection rather than changes in population heights. The authors construct a theoretical model to show how the decision to join the military under changing economic conditions may lead to biased height measurements. They then develop a simple, robust diagnostic for the existence of such selection in a data set.

Barry Eichengreen, Michael Haines, Matthew Jaremski, and David Leblang examine the relationship between county-level votes for Bryan versus McKinley in the election of 1896 and county-level data of economic and demographic factors. Based on the estimated relationships they speculate as to the economic conditions that would have been needed to cause Bryan’s election.

Arnaud Manas uses newly created data on the shareholders of the Banque de France from its creation through 1945 to debunk a myth that the Banque was controlled by its large shareholders, and to generally understand the relationship between the Banque’s policies and the interests of its shareholders. He finds that Banque shares were a lackluster but popular investment, at first held mainly by the rich and powerful, but later held by “petit-bourgeois” passive rentiers who were disengaged from the Banque’s management, allowing it to be controlled by the government long before it was nationalized.

Lars Nyström uses data from Sweden to test Deirdre McCloskey’s theory that the open fields existed mainly to reduce the risk faced by a farmer due to the caprices of nature. Nystrom finds that in Sweden, at least, scattering did protect against very local crop failures, but not against the large-scale regional harvest disasters that constituted a much more serious threat to peasants of the time.