Essex FRESH meeting on migration history

The Essex FRESH meeting, with a theme on migration in history, was held at the University of Essex on October 18. The participants greatly appreciated an excellent keynote address by Tim Hatton, Essex, who focused particularly on how to measure the wage profiles of immigrants in American history.

Among many excellent presentations might be mentioned one by Costanza Biavaschi from IZA, Bonn, Germany. She used American edition Scrabble word scores as an instrument for the ‘foreignness’ of immigrant names in the United States, in order to identify a causal effect of changing your name to something more American on immigrant earnings.

The next FRESH meeting will be at the European University Institute in Florence on December 6. See www.sdu.dk/en/ivoe/fresh for more information on forthcoming FRESH meetings.

This blog post was written by: 

Paul Sharp, Associate Professor, Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG), Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark

                                          The dinner at the FRESH meeting 

The lessons of the 1930s, by Nicholas Crafts in Odense

‘The Macroeconomic History of the 1930s’ given by Nick Crafts, Warwick, and organized by the University of Southern Denmark, October 21-23, 2013, was a popular PhD course which brought together 13 PhD students and 4 senior colleagues.

A common theme of interest for the participants was the quantitative economic-historical analyses of the depression in the 1930s. Here, one of the PhD students motivates her interest in this topic:

“The financial turmoil which began at the end of 2007 generated a renewed research interest in topics like banking crises, sovereign debt crises and monetary unions. Past episodes of such experiences, like the Great Depression of the 1930s can offer valuable insights for current issues. Hence economists’ fascination with the causes and the sources of recovery of the Great Depression are clearly understandable.”

Nick Crafts is a big name in economic history and a fantastic speaker, which gave further motivation for attending the lectures. Using a very structured set of slides and his gift for making clear even difficult concepts, Prof. Crafts helped the students to understand the main debates and the overall picture, to evaluate the important empirical contributions, and to draw out implications for today’s policy debates.

This blog post was written by: 

Andreea Maerean, PhD student, Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG), Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark