Author: Vincent Geloso

I have a new working paper, this time with Ilia Murtazashvili, of the University of Pittsburgh. In this paper, we revisit the work of economic historian Werner Troesken who argued that countries that were historically well-equipped in terms of institutions to generate fast economic growth were poorly equipped to deal with infectious diseases such as smallpox. We argue that, using economic freedom, institutions actually targeted the costliest sources of mortality (such as typhoid) and that the trade-off of high wealth/limited ability to deal with smallpox is incomplete. The paper has been submitted for a special issue of the European Journal of Law and Economics.

I have received news earlier this week that my paper with Peter Leeson on living standards in medieval Iceland had been accepted for a special issue of the Revue d’Économie Politique (the oldest economics journal in French but which also publishes English articles). The article, whose final version can be found here, argues that Iceland’s relative statelessness did not generate low living standards. Quite the reverse, living standards matched those in England and exceeded those of the most of the Western world at the time.

I have a new working paper with my friends Vadim Kufenko and Katya Khaustova on Malthusian pressures on late Imperial Russia. Concentrating on Moscow, we find that Malthusian pressures (the short-run relationships between wages, deaths and births) disappeared in the period from 1870 to 1910. However, the escape is narrow (very) and they appear to come back at some points during the 1890s. Our results are consistent with new literature on economic growth in Russia in the decades prior to the Revolution. The abstract is below and the paper is here on SSRN: 

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? In this paper, we use quarterly demographic and economic data from Moscow to answer this question using a VAR approach. In doing so, we provide the first application of this common methodology in economic history to pre-1913 Russia. We find signs that there was an escape from Malthusian pressures, but that this escape was a narrow one. Our findings are consistent with the existing literature depicting a low, but unsteadily increasing standard of living in Russia during the late imperial period.

This summer is the summer of productivity and I keep churning out new papers that needed to be finished. Here is the newest. Its with my friend Jason Dean of Sheridan College (who is an incoming professor at King’s University College) and studies the wage gap in Quebec between francophones and anglophones from 1901 to 1921. The abstract is below and the paper is available on SSRN:

For most of Canadian economic history, French-Canadians (composing more than a quarter of the country’s population) had living standards inferior to those of English-Canadians. This was true even in the province (Québec) where the French-Canadians constituted a majority. Today, no significant gap remains. However, the question of when the gap started to disappeared remains surprisingly unanswered. Most of the attention has been dedicated to the post-1970 data when census information is available and which shows rapid convergence. However, we do not know if the convergence started before 1970. In this paper, we use data from the 1901, 1911 and 1921 censuses to provide the first elements of an answer. We find that the gap started closing modestly at the beginning of the 20th century but that it stopped closing until 1970. This is an important finding as it suggests that while there was some pre-1970 convergence, the bulk of the convergence occurred after 1970.

I have a new working paper out there. This time, its co-authored with two friends from Quebec (we were undergraduates in economics running in the same circles): Julien Gagnon and Maripier Isabelle. This is a paper we started maybe three or four years ago and we took some time polishing it and improving it (we also got distracted in the process by other projects and newborn kids). However, this is good as the paper had time to mature into what I deem to be one of my favorite papers (after the lighthouse paper with Rosolino Candela).

In this paper, we question the linguistic wage gap between francophones and anglophones in Quebec after 1970. We found out that there was little convergence within birth cohorts over time. Most of the convergence that took place was across birth cohorts. This lead us to propose a different explanation for the convergence. Rather than emphasizing political changes in the 1960s and 1970s, we argue that educational reforms in the 1940s sowed the seeds of convergence. The abstract is below and the SSRN version of the working paper can be foundhere:

The wage gap between higher-earning English-speaking workers and those of the French-speaking majority, that had long characterized Quebec’s labour market, vanished between 1970 and 2000. We unveil a new empirical fact: the closing of the wage gap occurred through the replacement of older generations of workers by younger ones whose earnings were more equal. To explain this, we rely on a two-sector economy model characterized by linguistic barriers and capital mobility. The model not only explains the new fact but is also consistent with the timing of policy changes in the domain of education.