Working Papers

Persistence and Historical Evidence: The Example of the Rise of the Nazi Party
With Timothy W. Guinnane (Yale University)

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. Although this influential literature is promising, it raises serious questions about how to distinguish deep causal factors that persist across time from alternative explanations derived from the rapidly changing historical context or misuse of historical sources. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots. Several econometric, analytical, and historical errors undermine the papers' contention that deeply rooted culture and social capital fueled the Nazi rise. The general lesson for persistence studies is that beyond careful econometrics and serious consideration of underlying mechanisms (including formal theory), they must pay scrupulous attention to the historical context and the limitations of historical data.

Why was it Europeans who conquered the world?
SSWP #1344

By the eighteenth century, Europeans dominated the military technology of gunpowder weapons, which had enormous advantages for fighting war at a distance and conquering other parts of the world. Their dominance, however, was surprising, because the technology had originated in China and been used with expertise in Asia and the Middle East. To account for their prowess with gunpowder weapons, historians have often invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies in the peculiar form that military competition took in Western Europe: it was a winner take all tournament, and a simple model of the tournament shows why it led European rulers to spend heavily on improving the gunpowder technology, and why political incentives and military conditions kept such a tournament from developing elsewhere in the world. As a result, rulers elsewhere in Eurasia had much less reason to advance the gunpowder technology or to catch up with the Europeans. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution.

New Evidence for an Old Controversy: Scattered Landholdings and Open Fields
SSWP #788

We bring new evidence to bear on McCloskey's argument that farmers in the open fields reduced risk by scattering their land holdings. The new evidence is the grain output from a number of plots of land in two French villages, Onnaing and Quarouble, during the years 1701 and 1790. When combined with prices and wages, the output figures provide financial returns from each plot of land, and financial theory then allows us to construct land portfolios that minimize portfolio variance for a given mean return. The virtue of using returns (rather than simple output correlations) is that the returns take into account the price fluctuations farmers encountered. They also allow us to distinguish the benefits of scattering from those produced by crop diversification and they do so with greater accuracy than the output figures. In the end, the returns demonstrate that scattering of land holdings provided relatively little insurance. The real reduction in risk came not from scattering but from the diversification across crops inherent in the three-field system.

Land Rents and Agricultural Productivity: The Paris Basin, 1450-1789
SSWP #752

Using evidence from a sample of over 800 leases, this paper examines the productivity of farming in the Paris Basin between 1450 and 1789. Existing evidence about productivity is unreliable, the paper argues, and the leases provide historians with a new and valuable source for the study of productivity and economic growth. Much of the paper is devoted to a defense of the method employed with the leases, which point to spurts of spectacular growth on local farms but also to stunning setbacks during times of war and increased taxation. The paper concludes with analysis of the causes of economic growth in pre-industrial agriculture.

Social History and Agricultural Productivity: The Paris Basin, 1450-1800
SSWP #742

This paper uses a sample of leases and a new method to examine total factor productivity in the Paris Basin during the years 1450-1789. After defending the methodology, the paper analyzes the results from the sample, which should dispel the myth of agricultural stagnation in Old-Regime France, at least in the Paris Basin.

Economic Theory and Sharecropping in Early Modern France
SSWP #496

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century France - a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations early modern historians have tended to rely upon.

Social History and Taxes: The Case of Early Modern France
SSWP #495

Sharecropping and Investment in Agriculture in Early Modern France
SSWP #406

This paper examines the wave of investment in agriculture in 16th and 17th century France, a movement with parallels throughout western Europe. After dismissing the explanations advanced by most historians, I argue that the investment in agriculture resulted from royal tax policy. I then consider the predilection investors showed for sharecropping and suggest that this predilection can be explained in light of modern economic theories of share contracts.

Pious Bequests in Wills: A Statistical Analysis
SSWP #393

This paper employs maximum likelihood methods to analyze the increase in pious bequests in early modern French wills. Other historians have described the rise of pious bequests in wills, but no one has used multivariate statistical methods to explain the phenomenon. It turns out that at any level of wealth pious bequests rose over the course of the seventeenth century and that the bequests were most pronounced among the literate and women. The paper argues that the increase in pious bequests was mark of growing support for the Counter Reformation, which attracted an inordinate number of supporters in educated circles and in the female population.