This article examines the geographical distribution of tuberculosis mortality in Italy from 1891 to 1951 and its relationship with industrialisation. During this period, industrialisation brought about profound changes, although it affected the north and south of the country unequally. During the same period, the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis increased, and the disease became a major health problem. Tuberculosis spread mainly among industrial workers and in densely populated urban areas, where living and working conditions were often precarious. Overall, the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis was significantly higher in the more industrialised provinces of the North than in the backward provinces of the South. This article shows a positive correlation between pulmonary tuberculosis mortality and the levels of provincial industrialisation.

The 1970s oil shocks sparked high and persistent inflation in advanced economies, also tied to the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971 that left monetary policy without a stable institutional reference framework. Only in the following decades did a new monetary regime emerge, centered on inflation targeting schemes adopted by independent central banks. Beyond this, other factors affected inflation persistence, namely wage-price spirals rooted in automatic wage adjustment mechanisms, and fiscal policies financed thanks to the regulatory requirement for the central bank to purchase unsold public debt. This article gives a concise analysis of the rationale and provides descriptive evidence of the role these institutional aspects played in the 1970s, suggesting how their evolution has reduced the likelihood of 1970s-style inflationary episodes today. A structural VAR-based counterfactual exercise confirms that absent wage and fiscal pressures inflation persistence would have been significantly lower.

The Great Depression era provides a natural experiment to study the effects of employee stock ownership on productivity due to the unexpected nature of the stock market crash in 1929 and the predetermined expiration of employee stock offerings staggered throughout the 1930s. I collect information on employee stock ownership from reports by the National Industrial Conference Board, annual company reports and other primary sources, and then merge them with the US Census of Manufactures to form the main establishment-level dataset. The results indicate that companies with active programs had significantly lower establishment-level output growth and fewer hours worked per employee than firms with inactive ESOPs post-crash. These negative effects, however, can be mitigated in smaller firms where employees feel their effort level has non-negligible effects. To my knowledge, this is the first study to empirically investigate these early ESOPs as well as address how continuing an employee stock ownership program during a financial crisis affects productivity.