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The period from 1929 to 1939 was selected as the time for study because it was during this time that democracy, as we knew it in the United States, was confronted with two dire threats: the likelihood of complete internal economic collapse and growing success for anti-democratic "isms" in Europe. It is the purpose of this paper to bring together what is considered to be the most representative thinking on the causes and effects of the crisis and to see what features of the crisis have been permanent in nature and what may have been learned from the crisis that might help in preventing a recurrence. / Typescript. / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts under Plan II." / Advisor: Marjorie M. Applewhite, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-51).

The wage data that economic historians rely on for calculating key economic indicators and living standards across Europe are all derived from records of building craftsmen and labourers’ pay. Existing series suggest wages in London were substantially higher than in other European centres from 1650 to 1800, and current accepted theories ascribe Britain’s early industrialisation to the products and incentives of this wage structure. But the period after the Restoration was one of prodigious building in London, and of organisational change in the construction trades. This thesis examines the contractual and organisational context in which building craftsmen and labourers operated and shows that the nature of the ‘day rates’ used to construct wage series in London and England has been misunderstood. As a result, wages and real wages have been overstated for England throughout the long eighteenth century.

The establishment of a fully fledged central bank in Greece between May 1927 and May 1928 was a prerequisite for the country’s stabilisation programme prepared by the FinancialCommittee of the League of Nations. Prior to 1928, the National Bank of Greece had acted as a central bank whilst at the same time being by far the biggest and most powerful commercial bank in the country. Under pressure from the League, its governors faced the challenge of transforming it into a fully fledged central bank by shedding all business that was in the province of deposit and commercial banking. They chose instead for the Bank to retain its commercial activities and instead a new fully fledged central bank was established. This thesis explores both the central banking and commercial aspects of the National Bank from the enactment of the Law of Control in 1898 until de jure stabilisation in 1928. It addresses the following questions: why was the National Bank not in a position to transform itself into a fully fledged central bank on its own initiative following a path similar to that described by the natural evolution hypothesis? Why were the commercial activities of the National Bank so important that in the end it chose to retain that aspect of its business when prior to 1927 it had so fiercely guarded its central banking privileges? It is argued that it was the way in which the governors of the National Bank combined central banking responsibilities with commercial banking that safeguarded and preserved the financial strength and consequently the reputation of the Bank throughout its entire history as a bank of issue. The financial position of the dual-purpose Bank was also protected by the conservative and risk-averse way in which it pursued its commercial activities. The National Bank’s financial strength was based on its market power and its ability to select high quality assets and liabilities which resulted in its enduring profitability and solvency. The quality of its assets and liabilities was more important for its governors than maximisation of profits per se. The way that central banking reforms were implemented is also studied. The objectives and functions of the new central bank are evaluated as well as its financial position when it first opened its doors for business. It is maintained that the statutes of the Bank of Greece were at the heart of the central banking principles promoted by the Bank of England and were focused on the macro function of a central bank and on its role as the bank of the government. This thesis also sheds light on the complex relationship that arose between Greek governments and foreign supervisors between the enactment of the Law of Control in 1898 and stabilisation in 1928. Furthermore, it asks questions about the conditionality attached to bailout loans in the late nineteenth century and in the 1920s. The impact that international financial intervention had on monetary reforms is clearly demonstrated. It is argued that monetary developments in Greece between 1898 and 1928 reflect the political economy of the time as well as the historical circumstances. Monetary reforms were shaped by the objectives of the National Bank and the constraints under which it operated rather than foreign control. These findings provide valuable insights into why Greek governments have unsuccessfully struggled to implement widespread structural reforms demanded by their lenders since 2010 and as a consequence the country has experienced a deep and protracted economic recession.

This dissertation revisits Brazil's experience with multiple exchange rates (MERs) between 1953 and 1961. Exchange controls such as MERs were common across the world during the early days of the Bretton Woods arrangement, despite the resistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which assumed they caused instability and balance of payments crises. Latin America’s use of exchange controls was widespread, with different exchange rates also adopted as instruments to stimulate import substitution industrialization (ISI). Brazil’s MER system was, however, a unique experiment, with all the country’s imports included in a regime of auctions of foreign exchange, resulting in a controlled depreciation process with different sectoral exchange rates. The experience had two phases, the first of which diverged from other cases in the region in lasting much longer, maintaining stable macroeconomic conditions, and avoiding IMF interventions. The second phase resulted in a decline of the system's macroeconomic effectiveness and its eventual collapse in 1961. This research investigates the peak and decline of Brazil’s MER systems by analyzing a new quantitative dataset that is further complemented by qualitative sources. The main thesis is that Brazil’s MER regime was a ‘successful’ experience during its first phase, with a singular design that supported the stabilization of macroeconomic conditions. Officials were ‘guiding the invisible hand’ of the market to help balance macroeconomic variables. The dissertation also shows that the MER system was not a protectionist instrument to stimulate import substitution in advanced sectors and did not generate distortions to sectoral industrial growth. It was, however, transformed during its second phase into a mechanism to subsidize private sector imports and increase the government’s direct participation in the industrial effort, which was an industrial deepening process with costly macroeconomic consequences.

This thesis is about innovation and economic growth in less developed territories. It is motivated by the inadequacy of our understanding of innovation in lagging contexts. It is situated in the body of literature that examines and stresses the contextually contingent nature of innovation. It does, however, branch out to probe the link between innovation and economic performance and contemplate the design of strategic approaches to promote the latter. It is composed of an introduction, four related chapters and a short conclusion. Chapter 1 relies on an investigation of a large sample of North American and European regions to assess whether all less developed regions are, from an innovation perspective, functionally the same. In particular, it addresses the issue of what makes the less developed regions of North America more innovative than their European counterparts. Chapter 2 expands the scope of the thesis to include the emerging world. It unpacks the processes of innovation hosted by China’s more and less developed cities, respectively, with a view to identify and understand the differences between the sets of factors that drive and shape processes of innovation in them. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between innovation and economic performance in less developed regions. A comparison of two types of lagging regions in Europe is undertaken to explore the extent to which different types of economically disadvantaged regions are capable of transforming knowledge and innovation into economic dynamism, given their unique socioeconomic and institutional characteristics. Chapter 4 reflects on the strategic approaches that have been relied on to promote innovation and economic growth more generally. It reviews a handful of ‘strategies of waste’ and ‘of gain’ to ascertain insights into the steps policy-makers can take to maximise the likelihood that territorial development policies fulfil their potential and contribute to the reduction of territorial disparities.

This PhD thesis analyses the spatial dimension of economic development in 19th century France and Belgium. During the 19th century Western European economies underwent a socio-economic and technological transformation to sustained rates of economic growth. The integration of domestic and foreign markets driven by declining transport costs and the reduction of trade barriers, shaped the economic geography of Western Europe. Consisting of three articles, this PhD thesis provides detailed empirical analyses of the spatial effects of trade liberalisation, technological change as well as the relative importance of market access and factor endowments. The first article studies the spatial effects of the Cobden-Chevalier treaty of 1860 which lifted all import prohibitions on British manufacturers, exposing French producers to intensified British competition. The results show that increased British competition has led to a shift in the spatial distribution of French production and employment. Regions located closer to Britain lost employment and output shares in industries which experienced a rising importance of British imports. The second article analyses the interrelatedness between the diffusion of power technologies and urbanisation. I ask the research question whether French adherence to water power, and slow diffusion of steam technologies, was associated with low urbanisation, limited gains from urban agglomeration and through this mechanism constrained economic development. I find that steam-powered firms were around twice as likely to be located in urban regions while water-powered firms were highly associated with rural municipalities. Moreover, urban firms paid higher wages and were more productive than their rural counterparts. The third article studies the importance of access to coal and markets to explain regional patterns of Belgian industrialisation. The analysis shows that both access to coal and markets played important roles, suggesting that supply and demand factors should be seen as necessary rather than sufficient conditions of 19th century industrialisation.

This thesis contains three essays on behavioral responses to social insurance and taxation. The first chapter documents and analyzes an important and puzzling stylized fact about retirement behavior: the large concentration of job exits at specific ages. In Germany, almost 30% of workers retire precisely in the month when they reach one of three “statutory” retirement ages, although there is often no incentive or even a disincentive to retire at these thresholds. To study what can explain the concentration of retirements around statutory ages, I use novel administrative data covering the universe of German retirees, and I take advantage of unique variation in retirement incentives as well as in the location of statutory ages across individuals created by the German pension system. Measuring retirement bunching responses to 644 different discontinuities in pension benefit profiles, I first document that financial incentives alone fail to explain retirement patterns in the data. Second, I show that there is a direct effect of “presenting” a threshold as a statutory age, which is substantially larger than that of financial incentives. Further evidence on mechanisms suggests the framing of statutory ages as reference points for retirement as an explanation. A number of alternative channels including firm responses are also discussed but they do not seem to drive the results. The second chapter analyzes bunching responses around reference points and argues that bunching methods are naturally suited to quantify reference-dependent preferences. Using a standard labor supply model, the workhorse of the bunching literature, I first show that different types of reference dependence all have a key prediction in common: They imply sharp bunching of the outcome at the reference point. Observed bunching can be linked to underlying parameters, which motivates both structural and reduced-form estimation methods to implement an empirical bunching approach to reference dependence. Finally, I present two applications in the context of retirement decisions. First, I find significant bunching responses at a type of “pure” reference point, namely round retirement ages. Second, I complement the analysis from chapter 1 with structural estimation and find a quantitatively important role of reference dependence at statutory retirement ages. Counterfactual simulations highlight that shifting statutory ages via pension reforms can be an effective policy to increase actual retirement ages with a positive fiscal impact. The third chapter turns to a topic from the realm of taxation. Modern systems of firm taxation typically feature a combination of payroll, valued-added, and corporate income taxes. However, they often exist alongside special presumptive tax regimes targeted at small and medium enterprises (SME), such as a single turnover tax. This chapter uses novel administrative data from S ̃ao Paulo (Brazil), including data on inter-firm trade, to shed light on the effects of such dual tax systems on firm growth, market competition, and production decisions. First, we show that the firm size distribution is distorted by the eligibility threshold for the presumptive tax system. Second, ineligible (larger) firms are adversely affected by reductions in the tax and compliance burden for SME. Third, we study the relationship between tax systems and production choices. The presumptive tax mainly replaces a payroll tax and a value-added tax by a turnover tax in our context. Accordingly, we find that firms in the presumptive tax regime use relatively more labor input and source more of their intermediate input from other firms in the same regime. This leads to partial segmentation of the trade network between firms in the two systems. We show that heterogeneity in firm production choices drives part of these correlations, but there is also a causal effect of tax regimes on input choices.

Does past migration matter for economic development in the long-term? Does an area’s history in migration affect economic performance long after the initial migration shock has faded away? And – does it matter what type of immigrant settles in a territory for the economic impact of migration to persist in time? This dissertation examines the long-term economic impact of migration, connecting migrant settlement patterns at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century to present day levels of income per capita. It firstly estimates the effect of different compositional features of the historical migrant stock on long-term economic development levels in the United States (US), a country founded and essentially formed by migrants. Secondly, it tests whether there is a link between past European and recent Latin American migration to the US to identify whether one potential transmission mechanism could be at play in transferring the migrants’ economic impact across time. The results of the analyses conducted using a variety of methods – OLS, IV, and panel data estimation techniques – provide three novel insights. Firstly, historical migrant stock is one of the very few historical county features that still explain current levels of development. In contrast to other factors, such as past income and education levels or industry structure, the influence of past migration on economic development does not seem to fade over the very long-term. Secondly, compositional aspects related to the historical migrant stock remain highly decisive for economic development outcomes more than 100 years later. The diversity of the migrant population, the gender balance, as well as the average distance travelled by the migrant stock over a century earlier still influence regional economic development levels today. All three features have growth-enhancing implications over the short as well as over the long-term. Lastly, past migration – irrespective of the presence of family connections, ethnic ties, or migration networks – shapes the geographical patterns of successive migration waves spanning multiple decades and even generations. An area’s migration history acts as a crucial pull factor for future migrants and is at the root of the formation of migration-prone and migration-averse regions. Consequently, previous migration contributes to ‘rework’ the places of destination, making them more attractive for future generations of migrants. All in all, the findings show that migration not only matters for economic development, but that its economic influence determines the success and prosperity of territories and the well-being of their inhabitants over the very long-term.