Events
Seminars Workshops & Conferences
Economic history
November 30, 2022
12:00 - 13:30
Room R2.01, Campus Jourdan
PALMA Nuno
(University of Manchester)
American treasure and the decline of Spain
Economic history
December 7, 2022
12:00 - 13:30
Room R2.01, Campus Jourdan
VONYO Tamas
(Université de Bocconi)
War and Socialism: Economic Backwardness in Eastern Europe.
Economic history
December 14, 2022
12:00 - 13:30
Room R2.01, Campus Jourdan
KOEHLER-DERRICK Gabriel
(NYU-Abu Dhabi)
Land Redistribution, Inequality, and Crisis: Evidence from Colonial Ireland
Economic history
January 18, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
JUIF Dacil
(Université Carlos III Madrid)
The impact of copper mining activities on education in Zambia from a long-term perspective (1920 to 2000)

With Laura Maravall-Buckwalter
Economic history
January 25, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
SCOTT VIALLEY Thévenin
(Sciences Po)
L'émergence d'un espace élitaire impérial et ses conséquences sur l'empire colonial français ; 1885 - 1939
Economic history
February 1, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
GIPOULOUX François
(CNRS)
TBA
Economic history
February 8, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
ARNOUX Mathieu
(EHESS/CRH)
TBA
Economic history
February 15, 2023
12:00 - 12:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
BEIGELMAN Marie
(Université de Barcelonne)
TBA
Economic history
March 8, 2023
13:30 - 16:30
Room R2.01, Campus Jourdan
COGNEAU Denis
(PSE)
Autour du livre de Denis Cogneau Un empire bon marché: Histoire et économie politique de la colonisation française, XIXe-XXe siècle (Seuil, 2023)
Summary
Autour du livre de Denis Cogneau Un empire bon marché: Histoire et économie politique de la colonisation française, XIXe-XXe siècle (Seuil, 2023)

Intervenants :

Frederik Cooper (historien New York University)

Christelle Dumas (économiste, Université de Fribourg)

Nadjil Safir (sociologue, Université d'Alger)

David Todd (historien, Sciences Po)
Economic history
March 15, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
SCHNEIDER Sabine
(Oxford University)
International Finance, Bilateral Cooperation and the World Silver Crisis, 1871-1879
Economic history
March 22, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
BECK KNUDSEN Anne Sofie
(University of Copenhagen)
Economic Growth and the Rise of Individualism: Evidence from Europe 1700-2000
Economic history
March 29, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
MAGGOR Noam
(IEA Paris)
Freights and Rates: Railroad Regulation as American Industrial Policy
Summary
This paper examines the controversy over railroad freight rate regulation in the late nineteenth century United States. Did state railroad commissions have the right to dictate shipping rates to the railroad industry - the biggest and most strategically important economic sector in this period - and, if yes, what would be the consequences? It shows that advocates of rate regulation, who mostly hailed from the American periphery, envisioned government control over prices as a form of developmental industrial policy. They sought to avoid American dependence on resource extraction and protect producers on the western frontier. They were remarkably successful, with important implications for the economic geography of the U.S., patterns of regional inequality, and nature of American institutions
Economic history
April 5, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
LOPEZ CERMENO Alexandra
(Lund University)
The Long run unexpected consequences of the arsenal of democracy
Summary
This paper aims to evaluate why some public investment programmes thrive in promoting regional economic growth while others fail. We use the largest government procurement programme in the history of the US as a natural experiment. Our database consists of 13,531 individual observations of geocoded data by industry and good of US federal investments during WWII. We split the analysis into developed industrial counties (industrial clusters, high, medium, and low tech) and less industrialized counties (agricultural) and measure the impact of the investments using differences in differences analysis combined with propensity score matching. Our main result is that Federal investments were successful depending on the previous comparative advantage of the counties that obtained the public funds. Therefore, we find no significant effect on less industrialized counties but a significant one on the manufacturing and service sectors of industrial counties. We also show that returns of the war investments depended both on their nature and location (and their interaction) according to technology type. We observe a significantly larger effect of those investments where their relative technology intensity corresponds with the comparative advantage of their location. The higher returns corresponded to high-tech investments in counties already specialized in that type of manufacturing production. These results have some important implications for the design of regional and industrial policies
April 12, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
DYKSTRA Maura
(Caltech)
Enforcement, Agency, and Accounting Cycles: The Institutional Context of the Late Imperial Chinese Business
Summary
This paper will review some of the accounting practices of Qing dynasty firms as they created particular conditions for long-distance trade. Relying mostly on a sample of litigation pertaining to debts and obligations from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archive of the municipality of Chongqing, it argues that the distinct but synchronous accounting cycles of Chinese firms were particularly suited to the enforcement context of Qing markets.
Economic history
April 19, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R2.01, Campus Jourdan
RIDOLFI Leonardo
(University of Siena)
Leonardo Ridolfi (University of Siena), Carla Salvo (Sapienza University of Rome), and Jacob Weisdorf (Sapienza University of Rome and CEPR). Abstract:
Is mechanisation labour-displacing? We use the industrial censuses from 19th-century France to examine the effect on wages and employment of one of the greatest waves of mechanisation in history: the diffusion of steam-power. We find that the rates of growth of employment and wages were considerably higher in steam-adopting industries than in non-steam-adopting ones, both in the shorter and longer run. This finding disputes the widespread belief that industrial modernisation entailed technical unemployment and falling labour-compensation. As old and new technologies often coexist even in the same production unit, our analysis also exploits the interface between the traditional (i.e. wind, water and animal) motive-powers and the new (steam-powered) ones. Our observed effect of steam-power on wages and employment varied extensively depending on how steam-technology conjoined the traditional motive-powers
May 10, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
DE LA VAISSIÈRE Etienne
(EHESS)
TBA
May 17, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
JURSA Michael
(University of Vienna)
Identifying and Quantifying Growth, and Changes of Prosperity and Inequality in a Pre-Modern Complex Agrarian Economy: the Case of Babylonia in the Age of Empires (6th Cent. BCE)
May 24, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
RASTER Tom
(Paris School of Economics)
TBA
Economic history
May 31, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R2.01, Campus Jourdan
ROBERTSON Charlotte
(Harvard Business School)
TBA
June 7, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
GINALSKI Stéphanie
(University of Lausanne)
«Kunstkapital » : la Société des beaux-arts de Zurich et ses réseaux financiers durant l’entre-deux-guerres.
Inequalities history
June 14, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.15, Campus Jourdan
RODRIGUES Lisbeth
(University of Lisbon)
A Holy Alliance: Distributional Effects of Debt Service in Portugal, 1560-18001
Summary
This paper examines the distributional effects of public debt in Portugal from 1560 to 1800. The timeframe encompasses the transition of two distinct administrative structures from a fragmented to a centralized tax system. Whether fragmented or centralized, the tax administration established the parameters for the interaction between the monarch and bondholders in the execution of fiscal or debt contracts. The financial contract that supported this interaction placed the burden of annual interest collection on the bondholder, which was directly linked to the location of the fiscal district assigned for that payment. This paper raises the question of whether these two models yielded different distributional effects - potentially associated with the downward trend in interest rates - and whether they facilitated the coalition between the sovereign borrower and particular creditors
Financial history
June 21, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
MITCHENER Kris
(Leavey School of Business)
How do Financial Crises Redistribute Risk?
Summary
We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century – the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental truncation that jointly considers bank survival, the type of bank closure (consolidations, absorption, and failures), and changes to bank risk. Despite roughly 9,000 bank closures, risk did not leave the financial system; instead, it increased. We show that risk was redistributed to banks that were healthier prior to the financial crisis. A key mechanism driving the redistribution of risk was bank acquisition. Each acquisition increases the balance-sheet and systemic risk of the acquiring bank by 25%. Our findings suggest that financial crises do not quickly purge risk from the system, and that merger policies commonly used to deal with troubled financial institutions during crises have important implications for systemic risk
July 5, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
GIORCELLI Michela
(UCLA)
“The Effects of Managerial Education on Manager’s Career Outcomes”
September 6, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
BACH Maria
(University of Lausanne)
Emancipatory National Accounting.
Summary
Separated by thousands of kilometres of land and sea, two economists produced national income estimates in the late 1860s. An Indian economist, Dadabhai Naoroji, calculated India’s first ever national income estimate for years 1867-8 and 1870-71. A North American economist, Ezra Seaman, worked out one of the first estimates for national income and domestic product for 1866 and 1869. Although on different continents, with different circumstances, both Naoroji and Seaman argued that if they could measure the size of their economies, they could understand their progress. This statement seems evident today when economic measurements like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are printed in widespread media and publications daily. The practise of measuring our economy, however, had only just began in the 1800s. Others argue that it started much later in the 1930s-40s when the international standards for national accounting were established. While there is growing literature exploring the links between accounting and imperial processes, there is much less on how economists from what we call the Global South today have counted their own economies. Shifting the focus to economists from the Global South, rather than colonisers, offers room for new perspectives on what national accounting did for the Global South. Studies that examine the imperial practises of counting their foreign territories have uncovered how national accounting was yet another tool to govern, control and suppress the populations of the Global South. My study shows the contrary: natives of the Global South used national accounting as an emancipatory tool. Studying instances of national accounting in the Global South can give us further insight into how and why measuring happens, and how it reflects and shapes our reality. Examining the North American case alongside the Indian case could reveal new insights. India was only starting its nationalist movement in the early 1870s. North America had been independent for almost hundred years. The comparison could then identify differences of doing national accounting in a free versus a colonised country.
September 13, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
JABKO Nicolas
(Johns Hopkins)
The waxing of technocratic neoliberalism
Summary
The United States in the 1980s saw the emergence of technocratic neoliberalism. Assertive central bankers adopted monetarist policies that were increasingly popular in the economics profession, while a new breed of politicians embraced neoliberal ideology. Based on an analysis of FOMC transcripts as well as secondary sources, this paper argues that the leadership of the US Federal Reserve was crucial in shaping not only a new monetary regime, but also the broader assemblage of technocratic neoliberalism. The Fed supported an agenda of disinflation, fiscal conservatism, and free markets that would outlive the Fed’s commitment to it.
Economic history Financial history
September 20, 2023
12:00 - 12:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
SCHNEIDER Sabine
(LSE)
International Finance, Bilateral Cooperation and the World Silver Crisis, 1871–1892
Summary
Imperial Germany’s monetary union in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71) necessitated the liquidation of vast quantities of German silver stocks on world markets. Between 1871 and 1879, the German Chancellery engaged an international network of banks and refiners to acquire gold-backed assets in return for selling its silver in Europe and in South and East Asia. This paper reconstructs the Chancellery’s network of financial agents and presents the most comprehensive picture yet of the transcontinental bullion flows that underpinned Germany’s monetary reforms. Based on a wealth of banking and government records, the paper yields a more nuanced understanding of the geographic outlets and strategy of Germany’s bullion trade and its impact on the global silver glut that set in from 1872. The ensuing macroeconomic disruption that accompanied Germany’s demonetization gave rise to both prolonged uncertainty in bullion markets and growing diplomatic tensions across Europe.
Economic history
September 27, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
WARLOUZET Laurent
Europe contre Europe. Entre liberté, solidarité et puissance
Summary
Dans son ouvrage paru récemment (Cnrs éditions, 2022), Laurent Warlouzet propose une interprétation de l'histoire des politiques économiques menées en commun par les Européens articulée autour d'une interaction entre les logiques libérales (et néolibérales), solidaires (socio-environnementale) et de puissance (politique industrielle, protectionnisme). Portant sur une longue période, de 1945 à 2022, l'ouvrage s'appuie sur des archives collectées dans huit pays européens.
Economic history
October 4, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
ALVAREZ-NOGAL Carlos
(Carlos-III)
Well-being and inequality in Spain during the seventeenth century: the bull of Crusade.
Summary
Spain experienced economic decline from the 1570s to 1650, recovering gradually thereafter and only reaching its early 1570s per capita income in the 1820s. How did economic decline impact on people’s perception of well-being and inequality? An unexplored source, the bulls of the Crusade can offer some answers to that question. The bull was an alms that, after 1574, was annually collected by the Spanish Monarchy in its territories giving some material and spiritual benefits to the population. An inexpensive but fixed price alms was massively bought by those aged 12 and above. The number of bulls sold relative to the relevant population provides a measure of spiritual comfort and, hence, of subjective well-being. A subjective inequality measure, the ratio of the eight reales bulls sold, intended for wealthy and high social status people, to the two reales bulls sold, intended for the common people, is also estimated. After collecting data from 1574 to 1700, the results suggest that subjective well-being deteriorated during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century improving during its last third, while subjective inequality increased from 1600-1640 to fall in the third quarter of the century.
Economic history
October 11, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
CASTILLO-GARCIA César
(The New School for Social Research & PSE)
How Neoliberal Hegemony was Constructed? Policy Networks and Free- Market Institutions in Peru (1930-1990)
Summary
This paper analyzes the existent bonds between Peruvian experts and the transnational neoliberal network of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium/Mont Pèlerin Society during 1930-1990. We rely upon qualitative sources (member directories, institutional affiliations, board memberships) to construct a non-exhaustive database of 388 actors belonging to 295 relevant institutions for the period under study. Then, we apply social network analysis techniques to explore and visualize the nexus between personalities and organizations that pushed the free-market agenda and reacted to profit cycles in Peru during different historical periods that we call waves of neoliberalization. Our results demonstrate an increase in the participation of domestic actors in the Peruvian neoliberal network. Hence, six Peruvian intellectuals played the role of brokers transmitting the neoliberal discourse among different institutional settings: Pedro Beltrán, Rómulo Ferrero, Jacobo Rey Elmore, Roberto Abusada, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Likewise, this paper shows the organizational structure transmitting free-market ideas in Peru was heterogeneous and included government agencies, business associations, high-ed institutions, the press, and the Catholic Church. These findings demonstrate that organized actions of intellectuals, technocrats, and politicians have made neoliberal legacies prevail in the Peruvian public sphere during the second half of 20th century.
Economic history
October 18, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
GOBBI Paula
(ULB)
Revolutionary Transition: Inheritance Change and Fertility Decline" joint with Victor Gay and Marc Goñi
Summary
We test Le Play’s (1884) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributedto France’s early fertility decline. In 1793, a series of inheritance reformsabolished local inheritance practices, imposing equal partition of assetsamong all children. We develop a theoretical framework that predictsa decline in fertility following these reforms because of indivisibility con-straints in parents’ assets. We test this hypothesis by combining a newlycreated map of pre-Revolution local inheritance practices together withdemographic data from the Henry database and from crowdsourced ge-neaologies in Geni.com. We provide difference-in-differences and regression-discontinuity estimates based on comparing cohorts of fertile age and co-horts too old to be fertile in 1793 between municipalities where the reformsaltered and did not alter existing inheritance practices. We find that the1793 inheritance reforms reduced completed fertility by half to one child,closed the pre-reform fertility gap between different inheritance regions, andsharply accelerated France’s early fertility transition
Economic history
October 25, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
BARBOT Michela
(CMH)
"L’estimation des biens, un dispositif d’enforcement contractuel ? Les cas français et italien en perspective comparée (XVIIe -début XIXe siècle)"
Summary
La présente recherche porte sur le rôle de l’estimation en tant que moyen de réduction des incertitudes qui menacent la stabilité et l’exécution des contrats comportant la fixation d’un prix. Cette problématique est analysée à partir d’une comparaison entre la France et l’Italie (XVIIe-début du XIXe siècle), réalisée en mobilisant des règlements, des ouvrages juridiques, des manuels d’estimation, ainsi qu’une série d’expertises immobilières rédigées à Milan et à Paris. Cette comparaison révèle l’existence de deux différentes modalités institutionnelles de faire face aux incertitudes qui pèsent sur les prix et les contrats. Alors qu’en Italie la voie choisie consiste à faire de l’estimation une véritable procédure juridique et à encourager ouvertement le recours à un estimateur, en France le problème de la garantie des accords contractuels est davantage résolu par l’adoption d’une série de normes qui interviennent, en amont, sur le contrôle et la certification de la qualité des biens échangés. Cette divergence est confirmée également par l’analyse des expertises à Milan et à Paris, qui montre que les fonctions attribuées à l’estimation dépendent aussi de manière déterminante de la structure de la propriété, des modes de sa transmission et des formes de son imposition fiscale.
Economic history Inequalities history
November 8, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
SCHIFANO Sonia
(Bocconi)
The distribution of land in Luxembourg (1766–1872): Family-level wealth persistence in the midst of institutional change.
Sonia Schifano (Bocconi University) and Antoine Paccoud (LISER, LSE)
Summary
The paper analyses family-level wealth inequality and social mobility in Dudelange (Luxembourg) between 1766 and 1872. This period saw the end of feudal social relations with the integration of Luxembourg into the French revolutionary regime. The study utilizes archival data and five generations of descendants to connect the declarants of the Maria-Theresa land survey of 1766 with their descendants in the land registries of 1842 and 1872. Links between individuals are made from vertical parent-children-grandchildren relationships, however these relationships are not constant. To account for this variability, the number of ancestors available for each declarant and the generational descendant-ancestor distance that separates each declarant from his or her ancestors were considered in the social mobility analysis. The inequality analysis reveals a decline in the Gini coefficient for land ownership between 1766 and 1842, indicative of the dissolution of the feudal system. This reduction becomes less pronounced upon excluding property-less declarants from the 1766 dataset (note that in 1842 and 1872, these individuals are already excluded due to the nature of the data source). The disparity in the Gini coefficient between 1766 and 1842 lastly disappear when non-residents in Dudelange are removed from the analysis. Owing to data constraints, the social mobility analysis is also based on declarants that are residents of Dudelange and shows a high persistence of land among closer generations throughout the period. This persistence discloses that family-level transmission mechanisms limit social mobility and strongly advantage those with ancestors owning property wealth, even when there are significant changes in the organization of property relations.
Inequalities history
November 15, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
NOBLE Aurelius
(LSE)
The Persistence of Aristocratic Wealth: Institutional Measures, Family Measures and Social Mobility, 1858-1907
Summary
This article examines persistence in the wealth of title-holders in England and Wales between 1858 and 1907. While the historical narrative is that this elite was unable to weather the shocks of globalisation, industrialisation, and democratisation, I find that this group was highly persistent. This paper makes a number of methodological contributions, by linking the population of individual wealth-holders with genealogical data on the population of title-holders. This allows me to distinguish between two measures of title-holder wealth, which I term the family measure and the institutional measure, and to measure title-holder specific social mobility. The family measure tracks the wealth of the families that constituted this elite at the beginning of the period, whereas the institutional measure also includes new entrants. This method shows that persistence was stronger when considering new entrants (institutional measure) than just the initial families (family measure). The apparent decline of British title-holders (Cannadine, 1990) was predominantly about changes to the composition, rather than a decline in wealth. Title-holding families were subject to a different, lower, social mobility regime, where they declined towards a higher level than the population mean. The results indicate a social, rather than economic, mechanism for persistence. The paper illuminates the long-run trajectory of a social elites, and their relation to social, economic and institutional forces. Estimating these different measures is made possible by the construction of a new individual level dataset, containing the population of English and Welsh wealth-holders (2.2m), combined with genealogical information on the population of title-holders (1.4k deaths, 4.5k living), and individual data on the population of deaths (26.1m).
Economic history
November 22, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
DUCOING Cristian
(LUND)
Assessing long run Sustainable Development: Evidence from Global Genuine Savings 1850 - 2020 (With Eoin McLaughlin and Les Oxley)
Summary
Long-run economic development has focused on income, but it has overlooked the role of wealth in future well-being. We addressed this shortcoming using a novel database that links historical trends estimated by McLaughin et al. (2022) with more recent developments. In a provocative paper, Sullivan & Hickel (2023) take a critical position on economic growth and development in the last 400 years, basing their findings on a correlation between capitalism and poverty. We challenge these assumptions from a perspective based on the role of savings and investment in economic progress. Declining trends in savings, especially when we include the depreciation of our natural assets in our accounting, are a major concern for the future.
Economic history Inequalities history
November 29, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
VIPOND Hilary
(UCL)
Technological Unemployment in Victorian Britain
Summary
There is no quantitative record of jobs lost to, and generated by, creative destruction as industries mechanized in Great Britain over the 19th century. Such a record would enable a long run view of the impact of occupational decline, adding a dimension to debates on the future of work. I create a new, sub-industry, level of occupation for England between 1851-1911, using text recorded in individual level English census observations, as digitized by the Integrated Census Microdata project (ICeM). I focus on the impact of mechanization on the bootmaking industry, and assign 1.3 million English bootmakers to the sub-industry ”tasks” they performed. I show that technological unemployment obscured at an industry level analysis is revealed at the task level. In bootmaking, the occupational structure was transformed as the industry mechanized. Approximately 152 000 jobs disappeared as skills became obsolete, and another 144 000 jobs, demanding new skills, were generated. The new jobs went almost entirely to young bootmakers, and incumbents were not able to transition into the new employment opportunities.
December 6, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
VALENCIA CAICEDO Felipe
(Vancouver SE)
Bourbons reforms and State capacity in the Spanish empire
Summary
We study state modernization and its fiscal and political consequences in the Spanish empire in the Americas in the 18th century. We focus on the intendancy system, which introduced a new corps of provincial governors to address misgovernance by local colonial officers. Our empirical strategy leverages the staggered implementation of this reform across the empire, extending from present-day USA to Argentina. Using administrative data from the royal treasuries, we show that the intendancy system led to a sizable increase in Crown revenue, driven by a strengthening of state presence far from the traditional centers of power and the disruption of local elite capture. The reform also caused a reduction in the incidence of rebellions by indigenous peoples, who were harshly exploited under the status quo. However, the intendancy system also heightened tensions with the local creole elites, as reflected by naming patterns, and plausibly contributed to the nascent independence movement.
Economic history
December 20, 2023
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
WOKER Madeline
(IEA Zurich)
The tax haven that wasn’t: imperial statecraft, capital, and the politics of corporate tax governance in the French colonial empire, 1920s-1950s
Summary
What is a tax haven? What does it take to make or break one? And what role have states played in this process? Historians have so far focused on the Anglo-American world or blatant cases like Switzerland. Instead, this story will take us to the French colonial empire where, by the end of the 1920s, a growing number of colonial firms were transferring their headquarters from the metropole to the colonies with the aim of evading taxation on investment capital income. These transfers threatened to transform French colonies into tax havens. Why was this averted and why didn’t the French empire generate tax havens when the British empire did? This article explores the links between empire, decolonisation, and the expansion of tax havens via an unusual route: that of the politics of tax planning in the French colonial empire and shows that French colonial tax havens could have materialised on a large scale at two critical junctures: first in the interwar period and then in the aftermath of the Second World War. It argues that they eventually did not come into being because successive administrations within the French Ministry of Finance did not let it happen. Broader structural determinants – the relative weakness of the French metropolitan fiscal state in the interwar period and the unwillingness to let international capital dictate French development strategies in the late colonial period - crucially influenced the positions taken by the Ministry of Finance. Post-war dreams of restored grandeur made French authorities much more reluctant to outsource development and let go of state prerogatives. By exploring an unrealised possibility, this article makes a broader intervention in the nascent historiography of tax havens and highlights the role of state power in their (un)making.
January 10, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
MONTALBO Adrien
(ESSEX)
The Economic Origins of Vaccine Hesitancy: Evidence from Smallpox in Nineteenth-Century France
Summary
In spite of a vast medical literature investigating the impact of socio-economic factors on vaccine uptake and of a growing literature in economic history focusing mostly on the consequences of epidemics, little is known about vaccine hesitancy the drivers of vaccination in the long run. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature by focusing on vaccination against smallpox in nineteenth-century France. Smallpox was one the deadliest disease up until the introduction of vaccination in the nineteenth century, as it is estimated to have killed between 50,000 and 80,000 persons per year in France during the eighteenth century. To study the determinants of vaccination, we collected precise data on the number of children vaccinated each year within French departments between 1806 and 1888. By using wheat prices instrumented by rainfall and the phylloxera crisis as an exogenous source of income variation, we find that negative income shocks were linked to an increase in vaccination in France during the nineteenth century. These outcomes indicate that families reacted to negative shocks by vaccinating their children more often. This counter-intuitive result can be explained by the fact that parents chose to vaccinate their children when their existence was threatened by negative income shocks. Our results also indicate that the positive effect of negative income shocks on vaccination was stronger in department where child labour was more common. In areas where families depended more strongly on the income of children, the death of a child represented a stronger shock on the total income of the household. Families were therefore more willing to protect their children when their life was put at risk by negative income shocks within these departments.
Economic history
January 17, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
SGARD Jérôme
(Sciences Po)
Imperial Politics, Open Markets and Private Ordering: The Global Grain Trade (1875-1914)
Summary
From the 1870s onwards, global commodity markets were all governed by self-standing private bodies, typically controlled by elite merchants. The London Corn Trade Association thus standardized supply from across the world, turning grain into a fungible commodity; it arbitrated disputes; and it offered to traders a range of standard contracts that integrated the value chains, from the various export harbors till destination. Enforcement rested on market power and the threat of blacklisting: the Association had remarkably little relations with officials of any sort, in Britain or abroad: public administrators, judges, diplomats or army officers. This gave to thus private market a strong extra-territorial character: few merchant houses in the world could afford being expelled from the London market. Ultimately, however, this private trading platform worked under English law exclusively and it was upheld by both the London courts and the Bank of England. It was both global and local, and hence a full part of Britain’s imperial project. It policed a global network of private commercial routes while mediating the demands for market integration and the sheer diversity of the global political geography. Rule-based market power should thus be seen as a specific factor in Britain’s economic supremacy, together with relative geopolitical might, productivity levels or capital exports for instance.
Economic history
January 24, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
ALFANI Guido
(Bocconi University)
The rich and the top wealth shares: a long-term perspective
Summary
Over the last ten years or so, many efforts have been made at reconstructing measures of economic inequality (including top shares of wealth and/or income) for a growing range of preindustrial societies, especially but not exclusively in Europe. The seminar will offer an updated overview of this research, focusing on the rich – but it will go beyond a presentation of top wealth shares per se, seeking an answer to a broader range of questions. Who were the rich, in history, and how did they obtain their wealth? Did they play the same role in society, and were they perceived in the same manner, in the past as today? And are changes in the perception of the rich across history somewhat connected to the extent of their wealth, in absolute and/or in relative terms? The seminar will build upon a recently published book, As Gods Among Men. A History of the Rich in the West (Princeton 2023), which highlights —despite the different paths to wealth in different eras— fundamental continuities in the behavior of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. It also offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity.
Economic history
February 7, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
CAGE Julia & PIKETTY Thomas
(EHESS-PSE & Sciences-Po)
Une histoire du conflit politique. Elections et inégalités sociales en France, 1789-2022, Seuil 2023
Summary
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/CagePiketty2023Extraits.pdf

Site internet du livre et base de données: https://www.unehistoireduconflitpolitique.fr/
Economic history
February 28, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
IANDOLO Alessandro
(UCL)
Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968.
Summary
Arrested Development examines the USSR's involvement in West Africa during the 1950s and 1960s as aid donor, trade partner, and political inspiration for the first post-independence governments in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. Buoyed by solid economic performance in the 1950s, the USSR opened itself up to the world and launched a series of programs aimed at supporting the search for economic development in newly independent countries in Africa and Asia. These countries, emerging from decades of colonial domination, looked at the USSR as an example to strengthen political and economic independence. Based on extensive research in Russian and West African archives, Alessandro Iandolo explores the ideas that guided Soviet engagement in West Africa, investigates the projects that the USSR sponsored "on the ground," and analyzes their implementation and legacy. The Soviet specialists who worked in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali collaborated with West African colleagues in drawing ambitious development plans, supervised the construction of new transport infrastructure, organized collective farms and fishing cooperatives, conducted geological surveys and mineral prospecting, set up banking systems, managed international trade, and staffed repairs workshops and ministerial bureaucracies alike. The exchanges and clashes born out of the encounter between Soviet and West African ideas, ambitions, and hopes about development reveal the USSR as a central actor in the history of economic development in the twentieth century.
Economic history
March 6, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
PAREDES CASTRO Héctor
(PSE)
Land Without Masters: local political competition since the Peruvian Land Reform (1969-1980)
Summary
Can the historical exposure to redistribution spur local political competition and electoral participation in later elections? This study analyzes the massive land expropriation process executed under military rule in Peru from 1969 to 1980 and its effects over local politics with the return to democracy. The implementation of the reform was based on the creation of Agrarian Reform Zones (ARZ) and the use of regional offices for local execution located in high-priority reform areas within each ARZ. These zones were conceived and delimited for entirely different purposes a decade prior to the reform. Using the distance from a district to an ARZ office as an instrument, I show changes towards a more politically competitive local environment in land reform affected districts. In line with strategic responses to political competition, post-reform elections boost the participation of candidates with specific attributes: more educated, older and with indigenous background. Furthermore, candidates report more partisan experience but are also less associated with traditional politics. Evidence on driving mechanisms such as a dampened capacity of local elites for political capture, the growth of peasant-based social organization, and changes in voters’ preferences towards redistribution go in line with this interpretation.
Inequalities history
March 13, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
KERSTING Felix
(Humboldt University Berlin)
Industrialization, returns, inequality (Co-authors: Thilo Albers and Timo Stieglitz)
Summary
How does revolutionary technological change impact wealth inequality? We turn to the mother of all technological shocks–the Industrial Revolution–and analyze its role for wealth concentration both empirically and theoretically. Based on a novel dataset on wealth shares at the level of Prussian counties, we provide causal evidence on the positive effect of industrialization on the top percentile's wealth share and the inequality among top fortunes. We show that this relationship between industrialization, wealth concentration, and tail fattening is consistent with both cross-country data on national wealth distributions and with a new individual-level dataset of Prussian millionaires. We disentangle the mechanisms underlyi ng the observed wealth concentration and tail fattening by introducing a dynamic two-sector structure into an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous returns to capital. In particular, we study the role of sector-specific scale dependence, i.e., the positive correlation of rates of return and wealth in industry, and dynastic type dependence in returns, i.e., the gradual one-directional transition of wealth-holders from the low-return traditional to the high-return industrial sector. The simulations suggest that the combination of these two features explains about half of the total increase of the top-1% share, while the other half resulted from the general increase and higher dispersion of returns induced by the emerging industrial sector.
Inequalities history
March 20, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
HONG Sehyun
Income Inequality in South Korea, 1933-2022: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts
Summary
This study presents “Distributional National Accounts (DINA)" for South Korea. We combine household survey micro data, tax data, and national accounts to construct annual pretax income inequality series which is coherent with macro aggregates. We show the distribution of pretax national income over the period from 1933 to 2020, with detailed breakdown by age, gender, and income composition in the years from 1996 to 2020. This series allows for a much richer analysis of the long-run income inequality trend in South Korea than previous work based on fiscal tabulation (N.-N. Kim, 2018), which only includes top income shares and misses an increasing component of tax-exempted capital income in recent years. Our new series suggests that after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, income inequality has worsened due to the rise of tax-exempted capital income concentration at the top. Additionally, South Korea is characterized with relatively higher gender inequality and lower old-age income shares compared to the United States and France. Compared to other East Asian countries, South Korea exhibits relatively lower levels of income inequality, mostly due to the fact that its national income growth was more equally distributed in the early stages of economic take-off in the 1980s, even though income inequality has worsened over the last three decades. Rather strikingly, despite similar economic backgrounds and development trajectories, there is a huge gap in pretax national income inequality between Taiwan and South Korea. This gap stems mostly from the fact that the distribution of capital income in Taiwan has been much more unequal than that in Korea.
March 27, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
GAUTHIER Stéphane
(PSE)
Late height growth and adult maturity from historical quasi-exhaustive panel data
Summary
Combining height data from two 19th-century French conscription sources yields a quasi-exhaustive individual-level longitudinal dataset for men from their 21st year, allowing for an assessment of late height growth and age of maturity. Among 2,923 men born in 1887 in Corr`eze, annual growth ranges from 0.29 cm to 0.39 cm. Most men mature around ages 21-22, but the shortest in the first quintile grow 1.6 cm, reaching 162.7 cm at ages 26-27.
Economic history
April 3, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
TANG John
(Utrecht)
Superstition, fertility, and modernization: evidence from Japan
Summary
This project explores the relationship between modernization and cultural change by examining fertility patterns in twentieth century Japan. Japanese spirituality, which historically combined elements of animism, Shintoism, and Buddhism, informed fertility patterns by identifying auspicious and inauspicious years to give birth. During the Meiji Period (1868-1912), the central government implemented reforms to dramatically expand mass education alongside industrial and urban development. In the post-war period, advances in medical technology and family planning may have also contributed to the population's ability to avoid births in unlucky years. By using the spatial and temporal variation in education, urbanization, employment, and medical services, one can identify whether increased modernity coincided with less adherence to superstition in the timing of births.
Economic history
April 24, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
YAZDANI Kaveh
(U. Connecticut)
The Biography of Capitalism(s) – 10th to 18th Centuries
Summary
In this presentation, I will first discuss the different approaches vis-à-vis the periodization of capitalism. Then, the transition period towards merchant capitalism in Song China and West Asia from the 10th century onwards will be examined. Next, I will briefly touch upon the emergence of merchant capitalism proper, especially in northern Italian coastal cities. Finally, some Asio-African and European commercial capitalist and entrepreneurial-mercantilist capitalist activities and developments between the 16th and 18th centuries will be scrutinized.
May 15, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
LAMOUROUX Christian
(EHESS)
Economic history and crumbled data: how to write Song's China economic history
Economic history
May 22, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
JUHASZ Reka
(*)
TBA
Economic history
May 29, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
KESSLER Amalia
(*)
L'arbitrage corporatiste et la poursuite de la démocratie industrielle aux Etats Unis (1900-1940)
Economic history
June 19, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.09, Campus Jourdan
KOEHLER-DERRICK Gabriel
(*)
Colonial Service and Bureaucratic Responsiveness in the French Third Republic
June 26, 2024
12:00 - 13:30
Room R1.15, Campus Jourdan
PHATTHANASINH Emmanuel
Un déclin de Paris sous Louis XIV ? Étudier les dynamiques urbaines à travers les prix des loyers
Simiand workshop
January 11, 2023
09:00 - 13:30
Room R1.15, Campus Jourdan
Simiand Workshop
Atelier Simiand n°4 
Summary
Atelier Simiand n°4 
Organized by César Castillo García and Elisa Grandi

9h00-10h20
- Maria Padovan (UParis Cité et U Rome Tor Vergata): The development of the nuclear industry in Italy and France (1960-1980)
- Antoine Nseke Misse (EHESS): The Food Stamps welfare program in the US

10h20-10h30: break

10h30-11h50 
- Zhexun (Fred) Mo (PSE): The Making of China in the 20th Century: National Wealth Accumulation from 1910 to 2020 (co-authored with Yang Li and Wang Qing) 
- Tom Raster (PSE): Breaking the Ice: The Persistent Effect of Pioneers on Trade Relationships

11h50-12h: break

12h-13h00: Clara Mattei's book presentation: The Capital Order How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

13h00-14h:00 lunch

14h00-15h20
- Mirek Hosman (Bologna University - U PAris Cité) The supplementary finance scheme of the World Bank (1960s)
- Clara Leonard (Paris 1 & EHESS): La rivalité des troisièmes voies: Le néolibéralisme français (1938-1960)

15h20-15h30: break

15h30-17h00: round table “Connecting economic history with history of ideology and economic doctrines” with Elisa Grandi (Paris Cité), Naveen Kanalu (EHESS), Arnaud Orain (Paris 8); chaired by Clara Mattei (New School).

Drinks at the Chinchin
Simiand workshop
March 8, 2023
09:00 - 16:00
Simiand Workshop
TBA
Economic history Inequalities history
May 16, 2023
14:00 - 17:00
Paris School of Economics 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, amphithéâtre
Piketty & Pomeranz : “The great divergence vs social inequalities?”
COMPULSORY SIGN UP : https://framaforms.org/atelier-simiand-inequality-capitalism-and-the-great-divergence-may-16-1680867240
Summary
The two most influential books in economic history of the new millennium, Kenneth Pomeranz’ The Great Divergence, and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century, offer two complementary views: the former puts the accent on areas, regions, eventually national differentiation over time, in terms of growth and despite initially quite similar structures and institutions. The latter insists on social inequalities within countries, which are then investigated in their historical and comparative perspective.

For the first time, these two authors will be gathered in a round table; the aim is precisely to discuss the interplay between their perspectives, in both analytical and historical empirical terms. Did the great divergence modify social inequalities in the concerned, and other areas? And vice-versa, how were social inequalities influenced by the great divergence? And, even more broadly, how do we investigate similar interplays over a longer span of time (in particular in the 20th century) and in other areas (for example Africa).

Piketty’s latest book, A brief history of equality, offers a first attempt to answer these (and other questions). This round table, part of the debates organized by the François Simiand Center of Economic and Social History at the Paris School of Economics and the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), will start from this synthesis to discuss further integrations and developments.

Conveyor: Alessandro Stanziani (EHESS, CNRS)
PROGRAM
Presentations

Thomas Piketty (PSE, EHESS)
Kenneth Pomeranz (University of Chicago)

Roundtable

Chair: Eric Monnet (PSE, EHESS)
Denis Cogneau (PSE, EHESS, IRD)
Katharina Pistor (Columbia Law School)
Alessandro Stanziani (EHESS, CNRS)
Economic history Inequalities history
September 26, 2023
09:00 - 16:00
Room R1.13, Campus Jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
Workshop on Trade Unions
(Workshop organized by the Economic and Social History reasearch group and the EPCI Seminar)
Workshop on Trade Unions
Summary
The Paris School of Economics has the pleasure to invite you to the workshop organized by the Economic and Social History reasearch group and the EPCI Seminar, co-organized by Jérôme Bourdieu and Paolo Santini.

Program

9:15 Welcome coffee

9:30 Morning Session
Representation of workers’ interests at multiple levels
- Michael Becher (IE University): "Economic Shocks and Changing Political Representation: Are Labor Unions the Missing Link?"
- Vladimir Pecheu (IPP): "Labor Facing Capital in the Workplace: The Role of Worker Representatives"

Direct and indirect effects of unions on wages
- Ihsaan Bassier (LSE): "Collective Bargaining and Spillovers in Local Labour markets"
- Chiara Benassi (King's College London): "Trade unions, bargaining coverage and low pay: a multilevel test of institutional effects on low-pay risk in Germany"

12:30 Lunch break

14:00 Afternoon Session
Democracy at work: an analysis of the French reform of 2008
- Sophie Béroud (ENS Lyon): "The law of the 20th of August 2008 and its implications on union practices in the firm: sociology of the practical appropriation of a new juridical tool"
- Thomas Breda (PSE): "Electoral Democracy at Work"

US unions’ organization and challenges
- Paolo Santini (Copenhagen Business School): "Do unions have egalitarian wage policies for their own employees? Evidence from the US 1959-2016"
- Miriam Venturini (University of Zurich): "The imperfect union: labor racketeering, corruption exposure, and its consequences"
Program
Simiand workshop
December 13, 2023
09:30 - 17:00
Room R2.02, Campus Jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
Simiand Workshop
The French empires and their economic dimensions (18th-20th centuries)
Summary
Organized by Denis Cogneau et Arnaud Orain

9h30. Introduction

9h45 – 12h00 : Session 1
- Hugo Carlier (PhD student, SciencePo), « Conquest by Money? Tirailleurs Sénégalais and
Currencies in West Africa »
- Pablo Alvarez Aragon (PhD student, Université de Namur) : « Colonial Education and its
Intergenerational Transmission: Evidence from Colonial and Post-Independence Congo »
(with Catherine Guirkinger and Paola Villar)
- Fred Zhexun Mo (PhD student, PSE) : « Soldiers versus Laborers: Legacies of Colonial
Military Forced Labor in Mali » (with Ismaël Yacoubou Djima and Marion Richard)

12h00-13h15 : Lunch

13h15-14h45 : Session 2
- Mihai Olteanu (PhD student, Johns Hopkins University) : « La richesse des nations et
l’abolition de la servitude : un concours académique à la fin de la Révolution française »
- Jessica Balguy (PhD, EHESS), « Le prix de la liberté : abolir l’esclavage et
indemniser les propriétaires de l’empire colonial français en 1848 »

14h45-15h15 : Break

15h15-16h45 : Session 3
- Fanny Malègue (PhD student, Ined/Ehess) « Recensements coloniaux et pratiques
statistiques de production dans les plantations (Caraïbes françaises, XVIII e siècle) : des
chiffres concurrents ? »
- Noémie Marie-Rose (PhD student, Ehess) « Travailler après l’abolition de l’esclavage : 
l’organisation du travail ‘libre’ en Martinique de 1848 à 1855 ».