{"title":"Risk-coping behaviors in metropolis: Evidence from working-class households in Prewar Tokyo","authors":"Kota Ogasawara","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101722","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101722","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>I analyze the risk-coping strategies of factory–worker households in early twentieth-century Tokyo. I digitized a unique daily longitudinal household budget survey conducted in Tsukishima, a representative manufacturing area, to examine how consumption was affected by idiosyncratic shocks. I find that although the households were vulnerable and their consumption levels were impacted by these shocks, the estimated income elasticity of indispensable consumption was relatively low in the short run. The results of the mechanism analysis suggest that credit purchases from local retailers helped smooth short-run consumption, highlighting the role of informal credit institutions in mitigating vulnerability among urban worker households.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101722"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145598802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Living standards in Angola, 1760–19751","authors":"Hélder Carvalhal , Nuno Palma","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101732","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101732","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigate the well-being of urban workers in Angola under colonialism. Using a newly compiled dataset derived from archival and secondary sources, we construct welfare ratios for both skilled and unskilled workers in the cities of Luanda and Benguela from 1760 to 1975. Our findings indicate that Angolan workers experienced lower economic prosperity compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world. Living standards declined during the 19th century, followed by a recovery emerging in the 20th century — particularly from the mid-1960s.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101732"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145599248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crowd-sourced Chinese genealogies as data for demographic and economic history","authors":"Melanie Meng Xue","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101734","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101734","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper evaluates the usefulness of crowd-sourced Chinese genealogical data for quantitative research in demography and economic history. I first examine whether genealogies — despite well-known selection biases — produce demographic patterns consistent with established historical knowledge of China. Comparisons with existing studies show that aggregate population-growth trends and sex ratios over time align reasonably well with established demographic and historical findings, suggesting that genealogies, though selective, capture coherent and interpretable patterns. Building on these plausibility checks, the paper argues that the main value of genealogical data lies in their scalability and temporal depth, particularly as crowd-sourced digitization vastly expands the number of available records. These features make genealogies well suited to analyses that leverage variation across regions and over time, an approach that is central in modern economic history.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101734"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145691467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Democratization, personal wealth of politicians and voting behavior","authors":"Bas Machielsen","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101733","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101733","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Between about 1850 and 1920, Western Europe underwent a period of democratization and liberalization, resulting in the expansion of government and the establishment of universal suffrage. This paper examines the impact of politicians’ personal wealth on this process, with a focus on the case of The Netherlands, using data from newly-collected probate inventories as a measure of politicians’ wealth. The paper finds that the wealth of parliaments decreased significantly over time, and that richer politicians were more likely to vote against fiscal legislation, suggesting that personal wealth negatively influenced the probability of increasing taxes and played a role in determining government size. The analyses presented in the paper support a causal interpretation of these results. However, the study finds no significant relationship between politicians’ personal wealth and their voting behavior on suffrage extensions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101733"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145575568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Soaring in rationality: Bonds as a partial hedge against hyperinflation","authors":"Zhihao Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101720","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101720","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Why do states repay their debts? This paper addresses this question by examining how the Nationalist government partially honored major domestic bonds traded in Shanghai—<em>the Consolidated Bonds</em>—amid hyperinflation in post-World War II China. Three main findings emerge: (1) Bond prices surged exponentially between 1946 and 1948, surpassing traditional valuation benchmarks by tens of thousands of times, as a partial hedge against hyperinflation. (2) Price fluctuations were significantly driven by news indicating that the bonds might be redeemed at multiples of their face values following a prospective currency reform. (3) The Government ultimately responded to public expectations by redeeming the bonds at nominally generous multipliers, which aimed not only to sustain its bond issuance capacity but, more crucially, to preserve a currency system closely tied to its bond creditworthiness at relatively low fiscal cost. These findings suggest that a hybrid of the two principal theories of sovereign debt repayment best explains the experience of China’s Consolidated Bonds.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101720"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145404598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A land of sages: A legacy of former elites and university professors in Vietnam","authors":"Luu Duc Toan Huynh , Kiet Tuan Duong","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101723","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101723","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using a unique dataset of 3,022 elites from the Ly to Nguyen dynasties (1075–1919) and 1,324 recent associate (and full) professors (2021–2023), we find that regions with more historical elites have more modern professors. Using the distance to the school exam venue and the distance to the coastal areas as instrumental variables, we establish such a causal relationship. In addition, social capital benefits those from areas dense with historical elites. We analyze data from temples, schools, and streets named after elites to identify cultural mechanisms linking historical elites to contemporary academic roles in Vietnam. This study demonstrates the lasting impact of historical traditions on human capital today in Confucian contexts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101723"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145553696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Delegating governmental authority to private actors: Lordships, state capacity and development","authors":"Daniel Oto-Peralías","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101737","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101737","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates the consequences of delegating governmental authority to private actors through the study of lordships, a pivotal political institution in historical Europe. I first document a negative relationship between being a seigneurial town and central state capacity in ancien-regime Spain. Next, I focus on the Kingdom of Granada after its conquest by Castile in 1492 to leverage on that the initial distribution of lordships was conditionally exogenous, with the results corroborating the negative effect of lordships on state capacity. I further show two additional important results. First, the effect is very persistent, with former lordships towns featuring less state capacity almost a century after the abolition of the seigneurial regime. Second, there is a non-monotonic effect on economic growth. Contrary to conventional wisdom, lordships towns did not underperform royal towns during the Ancien Régime. Yet, despite not having started with disadvantage, former seigneurial towns experienced lower population growth from the 1910s onwards, a period in which the Spanish state started to play a bigger investment role. Thus, towns with historically less state presence benefited less from state’s investments, lagging behind.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101737"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145732699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The economic functions of extrajudicial violence in the Jim Crow South","authors":"Mark Stelzner , William Darity Jr.","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101735","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101735","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we analyze the direct economic functions of White-on-Black violence in the Jim Crow South. As we will see, White-on-Black violence was used to control Black labor and to seize gains made by Black agriculturalists. We find that White-on-Black lynchings during the pre-harvest period were used by White landlords to increase the total amount of man-hours expended by Black sharecroppers. We also find that the occurrence of one or more White-on-Black lynchings in a given county is associated with a 1.9 percent decrease in Black landownership in the same county in each of the three years following said lynching, and we find that the 1912 Forsyth Massacre and the 1906 Atlanta Massacre had even larger effects. Given the high frequency of White-on-Black violence in the Jim Crow South, the impact on Black labor and the cumulative effect on Black landownership and town and city property were huge.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101735"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145657194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Missing markets. Microstructure and liquidity on the London Stock Exchange","authors":"Rui Esteves , Gabriel Geisler Mesevage","doi":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101736","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101736","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper studies the behavior of specialist dealers operating in the London Stock Exchange in the 1870s. The LSE was a free-entry exclusive dealers market, where dealers were free to choose which securities to deal in. We show that dealers concentrated their market making in the most liquid securities. A combination of adverse selection and inventory costs prevented the development of liquid markets in most securities, with dealers opting instead to provide matchmaking services. Our results call for a reappreciation of the liquidity of the London market and offer a new interpretation of stylized facts about the Victorian investor behavior.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47413,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Economic History","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 101736"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145785796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}