In this paper I would like to present two cases in which the globalization backlash hit Italian migrants and authorities and forced them to follow new paths: the case of Argentina in 1890 and the United States in 1917. When a deep financial crisis that hit Argentina, one of Italy’s main destination countries in 1890, it was a blow to the Italians who were already integrated in the new country. The collapse in the value of the Argentine peso significantly reduced emittances, decimated savings and these effects were also felt by families who had remained in Italy. Moreover, the dollar’s strength compared to the collapse of the Argentine currency contributed decisively to re-directing Italian emigrants toward the US labour market, which from then on became the main destination of Italian emigration.

This paper studies the history of contract labor in the coffee plantations of São Paulo, Brazil, in the context of the transition from slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. It analyzes the immigration of German-speakers, who were the bulk of the Brazilian immigration policy until the 1870s. Focused on this ethno-linguistic group, it traces the dynamics of the immigration flows and how the Brazilian immigration policy dealt with institutional change in the prelude of the age of mass migration. In recovering a classical debate of the historiography, we add to the literature on contract labor, especially on the economic rationale of sharecropping. With new historical evidence from a systematic review of the “Brazilian Digital Newspapers’Repository”, the paper rejects theories of a linear transition from slavery to free labor, passing through labor-tenancy contracts increasingly more efficient. Rather, it proposes a framework of persistence in which the main theoretical element was the interlinkage between credit and labor. Brazilian coffee planters were initially indifferent to the specific type of contract proposed to immigrants, as long as the credit dimension was present. This strategy allowed the rural elite to compete for the poorest mmigrants, instead of promoting institutional reforms to make the country more competitive to spontaneous immigrants. To the Brazilian historiography, the paper adds some new episodes, such as a benchmark for the hiring of immigrants in 1835, a petition of workers in farm Ibicaba in 1851, and diplomatic tensions between Brazil, Switzerland, and the German States caused by debates about immigrants.

Economists have long argued that introducing social insurance will reduce fertility. The hypothesis relies on standard economic models of fertility: if children are desirable because they provide security in case of disability or old age, then state programs that provide insurance against these events should induce couples to substitute away from children in the allocation of wealth. We test this claim using the introduction of social insurance in Germany in the 1880s and 1890s. We find that some parts of the system indirectly promoted fertility by promoting marriage. Social insurance did reduce fertility directly, although the effects are small.

In the late 19th century, an intensification of transnational co-operation occurred in many fields, such as postal services and telegraphy. The international protection of intellectual property rights also made progress, or so it seemed: the Paris Convention of 1883 at least guaranteed the priority for any patent applicant in one country for six months. During this period, no other applicant could file for a valid patent with a reasonable chance of success in any other member state. Germany at first abstained from joining the Paris Convention; only later, when the priority period was extended to 12 months, Germany ratified the convention in 1903, whereas the US had ratified the convention already in 1887. It is highly important to underscore that it was not the main intention of the Paris convention to harmonize the different national patent laws, but to facilitate the transnational flow of inventions and the property rights involved. The aim of our paper is to show this limited approach of the Paris convention during the decades to come from two angles, namely 1) the discussion and growing pressure from parts of German industry towards joining the convention, and 2) the concrete dealing with the convention’s regulation, highlighted with a case study of the 1930s. The case study shows in detail the dealings between the pharmaceutical company E. Merck from Darmstadt and its US counterparts when it came to securing priority rights in several European countries.

Cross-border bail-outs and international rescue lending between governments have become a central policy issue of recent years and an important determinant of sovereign borrowing costs. Despite this importance, the history of sovereign bailouts and official debt is very much forgotten. In this paper, we address this gap in the literature by providing the first systematic database on international rescue packages during financial crises from 1800 to 2015. Our data allows us to put the recent bail-outs in emerging markets during the 1990s and in the Eurozone into historical perspective and to quantify the experiences of private investors with official bail-outs in a novel way.

The current historical consensus on the economic causes of the inexorable Nazi electoral success between 1930 and 1933 suggests this was largely related to the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression (high unemployment and financial instability). However, these factors cannot fully account for the Nazi’s electoral success. Alternatively it has been speculated that fiscally contractionary austerity measures, including spending cuts and tax rises, contributed to votes for the Nazi party especially among middle- and upper-classes who had more to lose from them. We use voting data from 1,024 districts in Germany on votes cast for the Nazi and rival Communist and Center parties between 1930 and 1933, evaluating whether radical austerity measures, measured as the combination of tax increases and spending cuts, contributed to the rise of the Nazis. Our analysis shows that chancellor Brüning’s austerity measures were positively associated with increasing vote shares for the Nazi party. Depending on how we measure austerity and the elections we consider, each 1 standard deviation increase in austerity is associated with a 2 to 5 percentage point increase in vote share for the Nazis. Consistent with existing evidence, we find that unemployment rates were linked with greater votes for the Communist party. Our findings are robust to a range of specifications including a border-pair policy discontinuity design and alternative measures of radicalization such as Nazi party membership. The coalition that allowed a majority to form government in March 1933 might not have been able to form had fiscal policy been more expansionary.

The field of knowledge concerned with the history of national rebellions cannot be fully understood when disconnected from its economic roots. The aim of this paper is to integrate economic history analysis with the nationalistic-oriented perspective, not to replace it. Initial findings from the outbreak of the Arab Revolt of 1936-9 and from the Intifada of 1987-90 show that a Davies-style fall did not occur prior to these outbreaks, and this may serve as an indicator for danger of using single-disciplinary answers to analyze the cause of rebellions. Still, the fact that the Arab Revolt of 1936-9 and the Intifada of 1987 occurred about 20 years after the beginning of a period of occupation (the British in 1918, Israel in 1967), and that the rebels were primarily young people who grew up under occupation, may suggest that the expectations of the specific groups of young people needed to be discussed on both macroeconomic and microeconomic levels and that expectations do not necessarily rise gradually.

We show that the bias towards local investments can to a large extent be explained by overall economic circumstances, the general performance of the market and the level of activity of the investor, using a unique historical source. We examine portfolio choices over the lifetime of the private banker Joseph Frisch, in Stuttgart, and find that t he preference for local shares was highest in times of insecurity, low returns and reduced investment activity. With higher returns, a stable and growing economy and more experience, the preference for local shares decreased.

The “Little Divergence” is supposed to follow a west-east gradient. Bavaria, in general, has been depicted as a “late-starter” region, where the material standard of living of huge strata of the society only improved in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, have there been economically advanced urban regions which had managed to get past the so-called poverty trap earlier? The core aim of this paper is to examine this question of economic development by the example of a case study of the grain storage policy of St Catherine´s hospital in Regensburg from the late 17th century until the late 19th century. This institution served not only as a hospital and as a home for the elderly – as an enterprise it has been active in the brewery business, on the agricultural and horticultural markets, and in finance.