Around 10 years ago, I finished my PhD. The main paper was published in 2022.
🧵 "The real effects of monetary expansions: evidence from a large‑scale historical experiment"
1/
Do monetary expansions affect the real economy—or just prices?
ʜɪꜱᴛᴏʀʏ gives us a rare experiment 👇 2/
Think early modern Europe (16th–18th centuries).
No central banks. No QE.
Yet massive & exogenous changes in the money supply, thanks to the findings of gold and silver in the Americas

How did local legal institutions power the British Industrial Revolution?
In a new working paper (with Tim Besley, @DanBogartEcon, and @chapman_econ), we show that Justices of the Peace (JPs) — magistrates acting locally — were a quiet engine behind modern economic growth.🧵👇1/7 We often hear the state had little to do with Britain’s Industrial Revolution. We argue otherwise.
Using novel data, we show that “street-level” legal capacity, via JPs, played a crucial role in enforcing property rights, resolving disputes & managing public goods. 2/7

New working paper by @kivanc_karaman, @EcHistorian, & myself. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that constrained government & state capacity were not systematically related. England stood out for combining both, which helps explain its modern econ. growth take-off. 1/15👇 Constraints on executive & state capacity are distinct variables. Executive constraints are mechanisms that restrict the decision making prerogatives of executives. State capacity reflects a state’s ability to effectively implement policies, often measured via tax revenues. 2/15

👇 Imagine Nazis deciding the content of a museum dedicated to the memory of political persecution. Would the international community tolerate it?

Unrepentant communists do this in Portugal at the invitation of the ruling Socialist Party. They are an affront to the @Europarl_EN.

https://twitter.com/SimpsonDuncan1/status/1475217452372054016

The 2019 @Europarl_EN resolution on importance of remembrance writes that "the Nazi and communist regimes carried out mass murders, genocide and deportations and caused a loss of life and freedom in the 20th century on a scale unseen in human history", see
europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document…

I'm delighted to announce that I have been awarded a large @ESRC research grant:

"Measuring the Great Divergence: A study of global standards of living, 1500-1950"

A call for a postdoc will open soon.

In this thread I briefly give details. Stay to end for some juice about FCT. We will use archives in 🇵🇹 and its former colonial sites to collect five centuries of real wages and welfare ratios. We will focus on locations such as Luanda in Angola, the Mozambique island, Goa in India, and Macao. We will know their comparative development levels over time.

📢New paper! Portugal’s real income p.c. grew by a factor of eight during the 2nd half of the twentieth century, a period of fast convergence towards Western European standards of living. To which extent was there a reflection of this progress on the wellbeing of ordinary people? We use a new sample of 2000 children to document trends in the prevalence of stunting and wasting in the city of Lisbon from 1945 to 1994. We additionally use a sample of 17,000 young adult males covering the entire country; it show a similar trend, with the expected time lag.

When will the Brits learn they are not special? Yet another Monty-Pythonesque Brexit nonsense horror story

Fully vaccinated EU citizens needed until today to take 2 PCR (expensive) tests to enter the UK: one before, and one after arriving.

Read on for lots of nonsense to come. I did both PCR tests this last week when entering the country and both turned negative.

At this point it was next to impossible, statistically speaking, that I was COVID-positive.

A few days passed, and then suddenly, I got a message from NHS saying that I had to self-isolate.

⬇️The main paper from my PhD dissertation is forthcoming at Review of Economic Studies, @RevEconStud. Title: The real effects of monetary expansions: evidence from a large-scale historical experiment. Thread... I explore the discovery of rich deposits of precious metals in America in the early modern period as a natural experiment for random variation in changes in money supply in Europe. The open access version of the paper is in this post: nofuturepast.wordpress.com/2021/06/30/the…

⬇️ Proof that my argument in MEL was correct. Those who rule the failing country that Portugal has become must find excuses and smoke screens. They are responsible for more than 2 decades of divergence relative to the EU. My speech (in Portuguese) is here:

https://twitter.com/MigCMatos/status/1401059050360508418

The opinion piece by the pundit (and failed academic) José Pacheco Pereira about me is a massive exercise in whataboutism. I can play that game too: why does him (and the official school programs) omit what November 25, 1975 was, and why it was necessary?

What is the real effect of money? @adambrz, @YChen_ks @econward and I we use a natural experiment: Maritime disasters in the Spanish Empire (1531-1810). A one p.p. reduction in money growth caused a 1.3% drop in real output that persisted for several years ehes.org/EHES_170.pdf @AdamBrz @YChen_ks @EconWard 2/3 Main transmission channels? Nominal rigidities and credit. Prices fell 1%, with a lag, and lending rates temporarily increased by 1.5 p.p. Other channels such as the Crown’s finances and changes in the silver content of the unit of account showed few signs of activity...