Paper Round

Week of August 8, 2022

Hello, all! Welcome to the latest Paper Round, where I discuss recent publications in economic history (and related areas). These semi-regular newsletters are my thank-you notes to paying subscribers. If you’d like to support my research, you know what to do. Enjoy!

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Over at Explorations in Economic History, Jonathan Hersh and H. J. Voth have a really interesting paper arguing that we mismeasure the introduction of colonial goods after 1492 in our welfare calculations. Using Hausman's measure of compensating variation and the Greenwood-Kopecky method(see below), they show that colonial goods like tea, sugar, and coffee may have together added 7 to 14 percent to consumer welfare, with 10 percent being the most likely number. This is pretty impressive in a period of stagnant real wages.