Volume-32-Number-1-Summer-2018
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The Newsletter of The Cliometric Society Volume 2017-2018 Table of Contents Report on EHA 2017…...…………………………………………………………………3 Letter from the Editor……………………………………………………………………7 Meet Your New Executive Director………………………………………………………7 Report on World Congress of Cliometrics 2017…….…………………………………15 Interview: Bob Margo……………………………………………………………………38 The Warbler Report…………...…………………………………………………………48 Interview: Gary Hawke…………………………………………………………………50 The Newsletter of the Cliometric Society Editor: Mary Eschelbach Hansen Layout: Ben Gregson Photo Credits: Summer LaCroix (with the assistance of anonymous Clioms) Editorial Office: Department of Economics, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington DC 20016 Send contributions to [email protected] 2 Report on EHA 2017 This story is by Geoff Clarke, Kara Dimitruk, German would cause these effects in the towns in question. Forero-Laverde, Sijie Li, Cathrin Mohr, Rohit Ticku, and He worried about how these effects were distributed Chenzi Xu. It was edited by Mary Eschelbach Hansen. among the counties in question. He also noted that civic leaders is a value neutral term, and that it would Members of the Economic History Association met matter whether the leaders were Gandhi or Stalin. in San Jose California from September 15-17, 2017. The chair, Lisa Cook (Michigan State University), Regretfully, it was not possible to recruit reporters invoked her prerogative to ask why these German for each of the 16 sessions. Summaries of 10 sessions revolutionaries were allowed into the country, when appear below. Information about the remaining session the U.S. had a very different approach to, for example, is available on the conference website (http://eh.net/ revolutionaries from Haiti. eha/conference-program-and-papers/). Finally, Christoph Koenig (University of Bristol) Session 1: Policy and Identity presented “Loose Cannons: War Veterans and the Erosion of Democracy in Weimar Germany.” Koenig Trevon Logan (Ohio State University) presented “Black estimates the veterans present following World War I, Politicians Matter,” which examines the impact of and uses a difference-in-difference approach to find black politicians during Reconstruction. He isolates that a one standard deviation increase in the number two testable policies that black politicians universally of veterans in a town leads to a 1.4 percentage point favored: land reform and education funding. Logan gain for right-wing political parties. This is consistent finds that counties with a local black politician have with the rise of the “stab in the back” propaganda of less sharecropping, and that literacy rates for African the period, where leftists were blamed for losing a Americans increased by six percentage points, winnable war. Koenig explores possible mechanisms narrowing the black-white literacy gap by seven for this effect, including the censorship of news media percentage points. Once Reconstruction ends, the on the front lines following 1916. effects are reversed. Noting a possible endogeneity in his findings, Logan uses the within-state variation The discussant, Saumitra Jha (Stanford University), of the 1860 free black population as an instrumental focused ideas by noting that one of these loose variable. cannons was, of course, Hitler, so this project is clearly important enough to be published in a top journal. The discussant, Vicky Fouka (Stanford University), Jha showed that his own research noted the effects of praised the paper. She noted an outstanding question long-term exposure to combat, and wanted the paper about the end of Reconstruction – Was the reversal of to investigate that as a mechanism, as opposed to the fortunes the result of the black politicians leaving or a proposed censorship mechanic. He also wondered if reflection of the preferences of the white electorate? there was a difference between soldiers recruited in peacetime and those who joined once hostilities began. Stephan Heblich (University of Bristol) presented joint work with Christian Dippel (UCLA), “Does Civic Session 2: Political and Technological Drivers Leadership Matter? Evidence from the Forty-Eighters International Trade in the U.S.” The forty-eighters were failed German revolutionaries who emigrated to America, advocating Reka Juhasz (Columbia University) began the session for freedom and national unity, and, in some cases, with “Drivers of Fragmented Production Chains: enlisting and recruiting for the Union in the Civil War. Evidence from the 19th Century”, which is co-authored Dippel and Heblich identify 470 of the Forty-Eighters with Claudia Steinwender (MIT Sloan). The paper from biographies, and use town-level information on aims to understand the extent to which advances in enlistment and desertion to show that towns with these communications technology increase the share of civil leaders had 20 percentage point higher enlistment trade in intermediate inputs relative to final goods. rates, and, once enlisted, had a 2% lower desertion rate. They overcome the identification challenges in the modern day data by studying fragmentation in the The discussant, Jakob Schneebacher (Yale University), 19th century cotton textile industry following the advised the authors to investigate the mechanisms that introduction of the global telegraph network They 3 instrument for the timing of countries being connected each other. The model captures the reciprocal influence with the ruggedness of the submarine terrain. They and dependence between network ties by giving show that goods that were higher up the supply chain, countries separate objective functions for monetary such as cotton yarn, benefited more from the drop in standard behavior and trade network formation. communications time. In other words, communication They find that monetary regimes shape trade on the advances fragmented the production chain. intensive margin but not the extensive margin, and they show that that trade ties significantly influenced Discussant Michael Huberman (Universite de the choice of monetary regimes. Montreal) questioned whether the claim of British hegemony at the mid-century was well founded and The discussant, Christopher M. Meissner (UC Davis), suggested there were other significant European was interested in understanding the intuition of the competitors. He also wants to distinguish whether network analysis and how the results would change trade in the cotton-textile industry could be called given parameter choices. For instance, in the network global value chains or whether it was intra-industry model, all choices are dyadic, but what happens if trade. In addition, given that there were other a few dyads (such as Britain and France) are more advances in communications, the gains attributed to influential? With respect to overcoming endogeneity, the telegraph might be overestimated. Members of they need to assume conditional independence from the audience were interested in whether the authors the error term, but it would be interesting to allow have looked at the tariff structure of the importing for spatial correlation in the error term because of the countries, and whether their supply chain variable historical events of region-wide meetings convened might be capturing moral hazard and contract for the specific purpose of coordinating policies. He enforceability problems. also pointed out that while the colonies were not considered to be independent nations, many of them Florin Ploeckel (University of Adelaide) presented were able to choose their own monetary regimes. “Gold and Trade: An Empirical Simulation Approach,” Finally, the monetary regime was modeled as an which is joint work with Rui Pedro Esteves (Oxford ordered choice, but the more natural specification University). The paper models the coevolution of would be a multinomial one. The first question was trade regimes and monetary standards during the about how decisions regarding monetary standards classical gold standard era of the First Globalization. were actually made and referenced the international The relationship between the two has been notoriously monetary conferences again. Aldo Musacchio difficult to disentangle because of their co-evolution: (Brandeis University) was interested in the political countries signed trade agreements because they were economy perspective: Could the model predict when on the same monetary standard, but they also join the a country should adopt the gold standard? A final monetary standard because they already traded with questioner humorously asked how the telegraph would have affected the decisions. Walker Hanlon (New York University) presented Upcoming Conferences “Dynamic Comparative Advantage in International Shipbuilding: From Wood to Steel,” which measures April 27-28, 2018 the extent to which initial cost advantages affected Cliometrics Conference the spatial distribution of production and trade in the http://cliometrics.org/conferences.htm long-term. The context is the shipbuilding industry from 1850-1912, which underwent the transition June 4-5 2018 from wood to metal ships. There is a clear pattern of 2nd International Conference on Cliometrics and initial resource endowments (US and Canada have Complexity cheap wood while Britain has cheap iron), and indeed https://cac2018.sciencesconf.org/ Britain had an early lead in metal shipbuilding. He compares American shipbuilders on the Atlantic September 7-9, 2018 coast (which were open to British competition) and Economic History Association those in the Great Lakes region (which