Economic History Seminars 2024-25

Winter Term 2024-25

Winter Term seminars are in CKK.LG.03 (Cheng Kin Ku), 4-5.30pm.

 23 January

• Andrea Papadia (York)
• The Effects of Immigration in a Developing Country: Brazil in the Age of Mass Migration
  
  

  Abstract: We study the effects of immigration on Brazil’s agricultural development during the Age of Mass Migration. We leverage the widely recognized value of historical perspective in immigration economics and Brazil’s unique characteristics among major immigrant destinations of the period—a low-income country with a large agricultural sector and weak institutions—to shed light on the effect of immigration in heavily agricultural economies at an early stage of development. Instrumenting for a municipality’s immigrant share using the interaction of aggregate immigrant inflows and the expansion of Brazil’s railway network, we find that a greater immigrant share in a municipality led to an increase in farm values and that the bulk of the effect was the product of more intense cultivation of land. Additionally, we find that it is unlikely that immigration’s effect on agriculture slowed Brazil’s structural transformation.

13 February

• Patrick Wallis (LSE) and Julius Koschnik (SDU) 
• The Complementarity of Education and Skills in Early Industrial England
  
  Abstract: Recent analyses of the drivers of the industrial revolution have drawn attention to the importance of two ingredients in the implementation of new technologies. First, the ideas that were created, disseminated, and refined by an extensive group of inventors and industrialists who were utilizing the tools of science and were informed by the values of the enlightenment. Second, the mechanical skills of the upper tail of artisans and mechanics trained through apprenticeship who implementation these ideas into useable technologies. In this paper we document a novel channel that connects the enlightenment and industrialisation by showing that the supply of skilled artisans grew in response to the expansion in formal education in Britain. Locations in England that saw an increase in the provision of schooling also saw a growth in investment in apprenticeship training. We argue that this reflects the value of formal education for apprentices who were then better able to access training positions based on their competency in reading, writing and numeracy, skills that youths were expected to obtain prior to entering an apprenticeship. General and vocational human capital formation were, in short, complementary in this period.  Given that the substantial expansion in schooling was promoted and justified by enlightenment ideas, this demonstrates a further connection between the major social and cultural shifts of the period and the economic transformations that followed.

6 March

• David Jacks (NUS-Yale)
• Suez

13 March

• Vellore Arthi (UC Irvine)
• Traumatic Financial Experiences and Persistent Changes in Financial Behavior: Evidence from the Freedman's Savings Bank

27 March

• Valerie Ramey (Stanford)
• Why Didn’t the U.S. Unemployment Rate Rise at the End of WWII?