Living standards in the very long-run:The place of Central, East and South-East Europe in the divergence debate

This chapter focuses on issues of measuring economic performance, focusing on real wages and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. It explores why the divergence between the eastern part of Europe and North-Western Europe occurred. The GDP per capita data tend to support the pessimistic interpretation of economic performance in Central and South-Eastern Europe during the early modern period derived from the welfare ratios based on the respectability basket. One of the simplest and most intuitive ways of comparing material standards of living in different places and different periods of time is to measure wages and the amount of goods and services that they can purchase. The silver wage, or daily nominal wage represented in terms of its intrinsic silver content, has commonly been used to compare material standards of living around Europe. The historiography suggests many potential explanations of the Divergence in development levels between the West and the East of Europe during the early modern period

Responding to a Shadow Banking Crisis: The Lessons of 1763

In August 1763, northern Europe experienced a financial crisis with numerous parallels to the 2008 Lehman Brothers episode. The 1763 crisis was sparked by the failure of a major provider of acceptance loans, a form of securitized credit resembling modern asset-backed commercial paper. The central bank at the hub of the crisis, the Bank of Amsterdam, responded by broadening the range of acceptable collateral for its repo transactions. Analysis of archival data shows that this emergency source of liquidity helped to contain the effects of the crisis, by preventing the collapse of at least two other major securitizers. While the underlying themes seem to have changed little in 250 years, the modest scope of the 1763 liquidity intervention, together with the lightly regulated nature of the eighteenth century financial landscape, provide some informative contrasts with events of late 2008

Serfs and the city: market conditions, surplus extraction institutions and urban growth in Poland, 1500-1772.

I investigate the relation between institutions, markets, and preindustrial economic growth. In particular, I analyze the impact of coercive agricultural class structures on urban population growth in Poland. My main point is that the impact of the demesne economy based on serfdom on urban growth was neither inherently negative nor positive. Instead, I suggest that the effect of serfdom depended on market conditions. I propose a new mechanism that explains how higher monetary and labor duties charged by landlords to their enserfed tenant farmers could have made urban settlements more resilient to a market crisis. I find empirical support for this idea with use of new database on urban settlements