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Hans-Joachim Voth is a tenured Associate Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona and the Associate Director at the Centre for History and Economics, King.s College, Cambridge. He is a Research Fellow in the International Macroeconomics Program at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London. Voth studied history and economics in Bonn, Freiburg, Oxford, and Florence. He graduated with a M.Sc. in Economic History from Oxford in 1993 and began his doctoral work at EUI, Florence, under the direction of Albert Carreras. After a year under the Tuscan sun, he returned to foggy Oxford to Nuffield College, where he earned his doctorate in 1996. Subsequently, he was a research fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, before joining McKinsey & Co., Inc., where he worked in Munich, Frankfurt and Buenos Aires. Voth has been a visiting professor at the economics departments in Stanford (1997-98), an official visiting fellow at Nuffield College (1999), and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies, ANU, Canberra, Australia (2000-01). In 2001, he became one of the first four economists in the UK to win a Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellowship. The Spanish Ministry of Education awarded him a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship for 2002-07. During 2001-02, Voth is a visiting professor at the economics department, MIT.
Voth.s research in economic history started with a paper that he originally wrote as an essay under the supervision of Tony Nicholls at St. Antony.s College, Oxford, where he was a visiting student in 1991-92. It explored the connections between economic performance and political instability in Weimar Germany, 1925-1933 [1]. He later revisited some of these issues, extending the argument that wage pressure was probably not to blame for the demise of Germany.s first experiment with democracy in "Did High Wages or High Interest Rates Bring Down the Weimar Republic?" [2]. This paper estimates models of capital formation, demonstrating that higher interest rates acted as a more effective brake on investment than temporary increases of unit labour costs. Recently, Voth has returned to Weimar economic history, analysing the central bank.s intervention in the stock market that led to "Black Friday," a large-scale collapse of share prices on the German exchanges in 1927. He analyses this in the context of the recent debate on whether or not central banks should target asset prices. The paper is now forthcoming in the Journal of Economic History [3]. Voth.s interest in the linkages between investment and economic growth that originated in his research on the Weimar Republic is further explored in joint work with Jon Temple on the interactions between human capital, equipment investment and industrialization [4].
His second main area of research is the British Industrial Revolution and issues of working time and well-being in the long run. For his doctorate, Voth analysed court records from London in an attempt to extract patterns of labour and leisure. The Old Bailey Sessions Papers proved an unusually fruitful source. On the basis of over 2,000 witnesses. accounts, he argues that labour input grew substantially between 1750 and 1850, thus vindicating earlier arguments by E.P. Thompson and N.F.R. Crafts. Daily hours remained largely unchanged. What drove up overall hours was a reduction in the number of feast days and the declining importance of "St. Monday" (the practice of taking off the first day of the working week to recover from the weekend). The total increase in working hours amounted to some 20-30% in total, sufficient to underline the importance of the Jan DeVries. "industrious revolution" in driving up output. The initial results of his investigations were first presented at the Clio Conference in 1995 and earned Voth his D.Phil (supervised by Richard Smith, Avner Offer and John Landers, examined by Charles Feinstein and E.A. Wrigley). The main findings were published in the JEH [5]. For his thesis, Voth won the Economic History Association.s Gerschenkron Prize in 1996 and the European Historical Economics Society.s Gino Luzzatto Prize in 1999. The thesis eventually formed the basis of a book [6]; for this, Voth widened the geographical scope, applying the same method to witnesses. records from the Northern Assizes. While substantial regional differences remained, the overall patterns of time use were not too different. An overview of the results and some further refinements of the labour input estimates can be found in a recent paper in the JEH [7]. One implication of this work is that even the "pessimistic" estimates of TFP growth during the Industrial Revolution presented by Crafts and Harley may be too high. With Pol Antràs, a doctoral student at MIT, Voth examines this issue further. They use data on real rentals of capital and land as well as real wages to derive dual estimates of productivity change. The results reinforce the new orthodoxy that productivity growth was relatively slow in Britain over the period 1760-1860.
Voth also has an interest in changes in the standard of living over the last 300 years and the usefulness of anthropometric data in this context. He engaged in a protracted discussion with John Komlos over the possibility that declining heights might have reflected greater workloads, especially during the 18th century (in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History [9], [10]). With Tim Leunig, he examined the impact of smallpox on the heights of London boys [11]. This matters for the usefulness of height as a proxy of the standard of living. Smallpox did reduce stature; but it also primarily killed young adults. Therefore, when the disease became endemic (and a relatively benign childhood disease), a decline of height very probably coincided with an important improvement in overall well-being. With Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, Voth explored some related issues in two papers analysing the same dataset from 18th century London. This data, originally collected by Roderick Floud and his collaborators, contains information on the heights and socio-economic background of boys from the slums recruited for training on the ship of a charity, the Marine Society. The main finding is that boys from female-headed households were severely disadvantaged, even in comparison with a relatively deprived control group. Not only were they shorter and less healthy than their peers; they also had lower qualifications, fewer marketable skills and a lower level of literacy, as well as a much higher chance of ending up in "dead-end" jobs [12, 13]. Much of Voth.s work on the British Industrial Revolution is synthesized in his contribution to the third edition of the Economic History of Britain, edited by Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson.
Recently, Voth has begun to work on capital mobility and capital market efficiency in Europe after World War II. Capital controls are on the top of the political agenda following the East Asian Crisis and the Argentine collapse. It is easy to forget that, until relatively recently, Western Europe also operated extensive and effective controls on cross-border flows. The costs and benefits of this policy need to be assessed comprehensively. Voth tries to do this. In two recent working papers he analyses the cost of equity finance, and the impact of changes in openness (of both the current and the capital account) on macroeconomic volatility [15, 16]. He has also just completed a working paper on the political determinants of asset price volatility during the Great Depression.
In his copious spare time, Voth advises clients in the financial sector, the German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt most prominently among them. With the CEO of the latter, Werner G. Seifert, he co-authored three books on capital market issues [18, 19, 20], and he also contributed articles to the Wall Street Journal Europe, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Handelsblatt, Börsenzeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Die ZEIT. His latest piece of "light reading" was co-authored with Peter Temin for Die ZEIT [21], and argues that the situation in the US after Sept. 11 is more similar to that in the late 1920s than many observers think . and that there is a strong case for decisive measures to stimulate demand.
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