Little is known about the size and performance of the Irish stock market in the half-century before 1914. Using data obtained from the Investors' Monthly Manual, we calculate total market capitalisation and construct a stock market index for the period 1865 to 1913. In addition, we also calculate dividend yields, and examine the performance of the market for company debentures. The results show that the Irish stock market grew steadily up until 1897; thereafter it declined markedly. We speculate that this decline may be explained by political developments.

This article presents new estimates of aggregate production in post-unification Italy: the first since the original Istat-Vitali estimates of some forty years ago not to recombine their component series, and to be based entirely on new research. The new 1911-price GDP series incorporates the recent Federico series for agriculture, the author's recent series for industry, and newly derived series for services that extrapolate the recent Zamagni estimates of their value added in 1911. The new time series for the 11 sectors specified by the original estimates often differ widely from their predecessors. The new aggregate yields a long-term growth rate well above that of the original series, but not as high as that of Maddison's revision. The end-of-the-century acceleration that characterised all the earlier aggregates disappears: total production followed in muted form the long swing in industrial production, which in turn reflected a simple investment cycle. The implications of the new series in the context of the ongoing debates in the literature are also briefly discussed.

The four articles contained in this issue were submitted independently and at different times to our Journal. They have been independently accepted as a result of the standard refereeing process. We have decided to publish them together, as a quasi-Special Issue, since they all deal in different ways with the thriving subject of market integration. Three articles use price data to explore commodity market integration, focusing on a variety of commodities and using different methodologies. The fourth article broadens the perspective to the market for factors, considering the determinants of internal migrations in Spain.

During the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s unemployment in Britain averaged 2 per cent. This was far lower than ever before or since and a number of hypotheses have been put forward to account for this unique period in labour market history. But there has been little attempt to isolate precisely how the determinants of wage setting and unemployment differed before, during and after the golden age. We estimate a two-equation model over the whole period from 1872 to 1999 using a newly constructed set of long-run labour market data. We find that the structure of real wage setting was different in the golden age, consistent with notions about the postwar consensus, but it did not result in wages that were significantly lower relative to productivity than during other eras. Rapid growth in productivity and world trade together with low interest rates did keep unemployment lower during the golden age than after the 1970s. But the key difference between the golden age and the periods before and after was shifts in labour demand that are not accounted for by any of the variables that are usually thought to determine the equilibrium unemployment rate.

I argue that Spain's long-term economic stagnation in the seventeenth century and beyond was the result of a process triggered by the windfall acquisition of precious metals from American mines, and driven by the consolidation of absolutist rule and the peculiar privilege structure of Spanish society in the sixteenth century. American treasure allowed the Spanish monarchs to command large amounts of credit and pursue an expansive imperial policy unlike that of any other Early Modern nation; when the cost of the Empire increased and mineral rents fell, the Crown increased the fiscal pressure while allowing skilled human capital to migrate into the tax-sheltered but largely unproductive nobility. I first provide evidence on the role of the silver windfall and the acquisition of nobility titles in the sixteenth century; of particular interest is a new data series of nobility lawsuits constructed from the population of cases housed at the Archive of the Royal Chancery Court in Valladolid. I then develop a unified theoretical framework that explains imperial policy as an optimal response given the existing institutions and the natural resource windfall, recreates the rent-seeking path followed by the Spanish Crown when mineral rents proved insufficient, and accounts for the long-term economic backwardness that Spain experienced in the following centuries as the result of an institutional lock-in.

Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the Prussian-German customs union known as the Zollverein gradually unified a scattered confederation of sovereign states under an internal free trade agreement. This article uses grain prices to quantify the differential effect of the Zollverein for market integration among Zollverein members versus European powers that were not part of the Zollverein, including France, Switzerland, and the Habsburg Empire of Austria. Overall, this border effect is consistently and substantially less than border effect estimates from contemporary samples. For the 1834 liberalisation round, the implied border effect, calculated as the implied decrease in distance that comes about as the result of the customs border being eliminated, is between 140 and 160 kilometres, with the smaller distance for non-German speaking cities, and the larger distance for German–speaking cities. Thus, common language in this sample provides an additional benefit of lowering trade barriers by 11–15 percent in distance, making border elimination more valuable among German-speaking cities than for mixed-language-speaking cities. The article offers a few reasons for why I estimate smaller border effects than are found in studies on twentieth century economies, and the analysis gives a new historical perspective on what drives trade costs and changes in market integration.

This study offers the first anthropometric estimates of the biological standard of living in Europe during the first millennium AD, and extends the literature on the second millennium. The overall picture drawn from our data is one of stagnant heights. There was no large-scale progress in European nutritional status over the period studied, not even for the period between 1000 and 1800, for which recent GDP per capita estimates indicate increasing development. We find that heights stagnated in Central, Western and Southern Europe during the Roman imperial period, while astonishingly increasing in the fifth and sixth centuries. Noteworthy also is the similarity of height development in the three large regions of Europe. In an exploratory regression analysis of height determinants, population density turns out to have been an economically (not statistically) significant and negative factor, indicating the relevance of decreasing marginal product theories and Malthusian theory for the pre-1800 period. Of marginal significance, however, were climate (warmer temperatures being favourable for a good nutritional status), social inequality and gender inequality (both reducing average height). Lastly, we also discuss the limitations of our approach.

This article applies event-study methodology to explore the economic consequences of cartelisation in Imperial Germany. By combining qualitative and quantitative sources it discusses the risk and return effects of the establishment of the allegedly most powerful cartel, the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate (RWKS). Its findings cast doubts on the importance of the RWKS for the development of the German coal industry. The cartel did not affect the major part of a typical mine's risk-the firm-specific risk – and its moderate return effects were mostly confined to larger mines. Cartelisation did not seem to be an important pillar of ‘organised capitalism’.

In a sample that contains annual prices of 39 selected commodities in Britain and Germany in the period 1850 to 1913, substantial evidence of well integrated commodity markets is found. The degree of integration is not universal across markets and varies over time, however. Absolute price variability was in general decreasing over the period, indicating more closely integrated markets. But the reintroduction of tariffs in Germany beginning in 1879 implied that this trend was broken for a number of agricultural commodities. With the exception of animal foodstuffs, which were affected by non-tariff barriers, most price series are cointegrated. The speed of adjustments of prices, measured by estimates of the half-life of Law of One Price (LOP) deviations, is often in the range of 1 to 1.5 years, which is lower than that found in many other studies of market integration.

This article provides an overview of Italian urbanisation between 1000 and 2000, which may help in distinguishing the main phases of Italian economic history. In this millennium, three epochs can be singled out: from the tenth century to 1300–50; from 1300–50 to 1860–70; and from 1860–70 to 2000. While the first phase is characterised by slow progress and the third by massive urbanisation, the intermediate phase saw declining urbanisation. A strong connection exists, in these periods, between urbanisation and the productivity of the Italian economic system. By looking at Italian economic history from the perspective of urbanisation, we can draw a different picture from the one prevailing in recent literature on the subject.

During the late nineteenth century, technologies to measure the quality of the milk in butter production became available, enabling creameries to pay suppliers of raw milk according to quality. Having identified the advantages to the creameries in terms of incentive provision, we demonstrate that the diffusion among the cooperative creameries was relatively slow, particularly relative to other technologies adopted by the same creameries over the same period, with a large number ‘dragging their feet’. We also observe that late adopters often do not choose the most up-to-date technology and that early adopters who later upgrade their technology in many cases do not choose the current best practice. We consider a number of reasons for the observed patterns, which are at odds with the co-operative creameries being seen as technologically ‘savvy’. A proper implementation created both winners and losers among suppliers, and the size of these widened with newer versions of the technology. We show that the slow and inappropriate implementation can be explained by the need to get the technology accepted by a sufficient number of suppliers.

In this article we study the issue of cross-border economic integration in the context of Poland’s reunification from 1919. We find that the Polish interwar economy can be regarded as integrated with some restrictions. Moreover, a significant negative impact of the former partition borders on the integration level in the early 1920s vanishes in the middle of the 1920s. This suggests that the post-reunification integration was surprisingly successful. The degree of integration is comparable to that of 19th century France.

European Graduate School for Training in Economic and Social Historical Research

Industrialisation in European countries caused an increase in both internal migration and emigration. Internal migrants were even more numerous than overseas emigrants. However, few empirical studies have sought to explain internal migrations. This article examines the causes and effects of internal migration in Spain with the aim of answering some of the questions debated in the literature. The results show that internal migrations in Spain were driven by economic forces. Moreover, the lag in rural population transfer can be explained by the scant pull of industrial and urban destinations. The article also shows that internal migrants differed in some respects from the people who emigrated overseas. Finally, the impact of internal migration on labour markets is measured.

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