Welfare budget lessons from Pre-Industrial England: why the ‘big society’ idea may not work

Cutting welfare spending is unlikely to lead to an increase in private voluntary work and charitable giving, explain Nina Boberg-Fazlic and Paul Sharp. Using historical data from late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England, they illustrate how parts of the country that saw increased levels of spending under the Poor Laws also enjoyed higher levels of charitable income

Winners and losers from agrarian reform: evidence from Danish land inequality 1682-1895

Pro-market and pro-farmer agrarian reforms enacted in eighteenth century Denmark laid the basis for rural development but we demonstrate that they also resulted in increased inequality. We investigate this using a novel parish-level database spanning more than two centuries. We identify the impact of land quality on inequality following the reforms by instrumenting with soil type and find increases in areas with more productive land. We propose and find evidence for a mechanism whereby agrarian reforms allowed areas with better soil quality to realize greater productivity gains. This in turn led to greater population increases, and a larger share of smallholders and landless laborers. Finally, we demonstrate the impact on the winners and losers: more unequal areas witnessed increases in top incomes, but greater emigration of the rural poor, to the United States in particular. Thus, the losers were able to vote with their feet, in stark contrast to those who might lose from similar reforms in developing countries today

Pandemics and protectionism: evidence from the "Spanish" flu

The impact of COVID-19 on recent tendencies towards international isolationism has been much speculated on but remains to be seen. We suggest that valuable evidence can be gleaned from the "Spanish" flu of 1918-20. It is well-known that the world fell into a protectionist spiral following the First World War, but scholars have almost exclusively ignored the impact of the pandemic. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy on data for Europe and find that excess deaths had a significant impact on trade policy, independent of the war. A one standard deviation increase in excess deaths during the outbreak implied 0.022 percentage points higher tariffs subsequently, corresponding to an increase of one third of a standard deviation in tariffs. Health policy should aim to avoid the experience of the interwar period and consider the international macroeconomic impact of measures (not) taken

Pandemics and protectionism: evidence from the "Spanish" flu

The impact of COVID-19 on recent tendencies towards international isolationism has been much speculated on but remains to be seen. We suggest that valuable evidence can be gleaned from the "Spanish" flu of 1918-20. It is well-known that the world fell into a protectionist spiral following the First World War, but scholars have almost exclusively ignored the impact of the pandemic. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy on data for Europe and find that excess deaths had a significant impact on trade policy, independent of the war. A one standard deviation increase in excess deaths during the outbreak implied 0.022 percentage points higher tariffs subsequently, corresponding to an increase of one third of a standard deviation in tariffs. Health policy should aim to avoid the experience of the interwar period and consider the international macroeconomic impact of measures (not) taken

La construction des représentations boursières / The construction of the stock market representations

Support du cours / course material : Le modèle de marche au hasard en finance chapitre 1 / chapter 1 : p. 24-48. Lectures : Séminaire Arts & Sociétés, 13/12/2007, "Opacités de la technique" A. Gunthert, "La transparence voilée ou la couleur du temps qui passe", séminaire Arts & Sociétés, 13/12/2007 C. Walter, "Technologies d'enregistrement et images de l'incertitude", séminaire Arts & Sociétés, 13/12/200