The economic history of the United States is that of Europeans and their institutions. Indigenous nations are absent. This absence is partly due to a lack of data but perhaps also to a perception that Indigenous communities contributed little to U.S. growth. Three case studies explore the economic complexity and social stratification across different nations/regions prior to contact. Migrants to the United States came not to an empty land but one with settled agriculture, complex production processes, and extensive trade relations, upon which Europeans built.

The literature has pointed out the negative aspects of political dynasties. But can political dynasties help prevent autocratic reversals? We argue that political dynasties differ according to their ideological origin and that those whose founder was a defender of democratic ideals, for simplicity labeled “pro-democratic dynasties,” show stronger support for democracy. We analyze the vote by the French parliament on 10 July 1940 of an enabling act that granted full power to Marshall Philippe Pétain, thereby ending the Third French Republic and aligning France with Nazi Germany. Using data collected from the biographies of parliamentarians and information on their voting behavior, we find that members of a pro-democratic dynasty were 9.6 to 15.1 percentage points more likely to oppose the act than other parliamentarians. We report evidence that socialization inside and outside parliament shaped the vote of parliamentarians.

This paper estimates the causal impact of short-term aggregate fluctuations in Egypt, 1911–48, using global cotton price shocks. Firm entry was procyclical, and exit was acyclical. There were persistent differences between cohorts over the cycle; expansionary cohorts were of lower quality. The evidence supports models of firm entry with ex-ante heterogeneity. The findings highlight the extensive margin of entry as the primary adjustment mechanism. As a result, recessions had a strong “isolation” effect. This nature of firm entry amplified and propagated temporary price shocks.

We use historical census data to show that Sweden exhibited high levels of intergenerational occupational mobility several decades before the rise of the welfare state. Mobility rates were higher than in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century European countries, closer to those observed in the highly mobile nineteenth-century United States. We leverage mobility variation across Swedish municipalities to shed light on potential determinants: economic growth and migration are positively correlated with mobility, consistent with the patterns observed across countries.

Does the prosperity of medieval manors depend on their position in the feudal system? How large are these effects? And what are the underlying economic mechanisms? Using Domesday Book, a unique country-wide survey conducted by William the Conqueror, we reinterpret the eleventh-century English feudal system as a network in which manors are linked to one another based on their common ownership structure. Both a reduced-form and a more structural approach reveal the existence of external economies of scale: manorial prosperity was closely intertwined with the fortune of feudal peers. Our findings quantitatively establish the existence of feudal coordination in High-Medieval agricultural activities, revealing how institutionalized interactions could serve to mitigate transaction costs.

The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy’s postwar economic development. It exploits differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could modernize their infrastructure more quickly experienced higher increases in agricultural production, especially for perishable crops. In the same provinces, we observe larger investments in labor-saving machines, the entry of more firms into the industrial sector, and a larger expansion of the industrial and service workforces.

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where Black officeholders were attacked have the largest tax reversions. This provides the first quantitative evidence that Reconstruction political violence was specifically related to Black political efficacy.