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ECONOMIC HISTORY ABSTRACTS"Families as Roommates: Changes in U.S. Household Size from 1850 to 2000"
ALEJANDRINA SALCEDO, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Living arrangements have changed enormously over the last two centuries. While the average American today lives in a household of only three people, in 1850 household size was twice that figure. Further, both the number of children and the number of adults in a household have fallen dramatically. We develop a simple theory of household size where living with others is beneficial solely because the costs of household public goods can be shared. In other words, we abstract from intra-family relations and focus on households as collections of roommates. The model's mechanism is that rising income leads to a falling expenditure share on household public goods, which endogenously makes household formation less beneficial and privacy more attractive. To assess the magnitude of this mechanism, we first calibrate the model to match the relationship between household size, consumption patterns, and income in the cross-section at the end of the 20th century. We then project the model back to 1850 by changing income. We find that our proposed mechanism can account for 37 percent of the decline in the number of adults in a household between 1850 and 2000, and for 16 percent of the decline in the number of children. "Thirty Years of Currency Crises in Argentina: External Shocks or Domestic Fragility?"
GRACIELA KAMINSKY, George Washington University - Department of Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
This paper examines Argentina's currency crises from 1970 to 2001, with particular attention to the role of domestic and external factors. Using VAR estimations, we find that deteriorating domestic fundamentals matter. For example, at the core of the late 1980s crises was excessively loose monetary policy while a sharp output contration triggered the collapse of the currency board in January 2002. In contrast, adverse external shocks were at the heart of the 1995 crisis, with spillovers from the Mexican crisis and high world interest rates being key sources of financial distress. "I Come to Bury Globalization, Not to Praise It"
PETER A. G. VAN BERGEIJK, Institute of Social Studies (ISS), CERES, research School for Resource Studies for Development
This paper measures and discusses recent developments of import volumes making appropriate comparisons against earlier historic episodes whenever relevant. The descriptive analysis covers the inter bellum, the major financial crises of the 1980s, the 1990s and early 2000, as well as the most recent crisis 2007Q1-2009Q2. The findings substantiated that recent developments classify as a unique phase in economic history. The analysis of these descriptive statistics suggests for the present import collapse as likely outcomes (peak to trough): a decline by some 20 to 25 per cent and a minimal duration of 5 quarters. It is quite possible that the collapse will continue - at least duration will in all likelihood increase further.
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Solicitation of Abstracts
Economic History publishes working and accepted paper abstracts of papers dealing with all aspects of economic and business history of the world around. The topics in this journal include the subjects in Section N of the JEL Classification System.
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