Globalization revisited: Market integration and the wheat trade between North America and Britain from the eighteenth century

West versus Far East: early globalization and the great divergence

“…Then, globalization started in the West by the first half of the eighteenth century when the grain markets had become increasingly integrated within Europe and between Europe and the United States, see Dobado et al (2012). 4 Sharp and Weisdorf (2013) have reached a similar conclusion from their study of the wheat trade between the United States and the United Kingdom.…”

Banking on the Boom, Tripped by the Bust: Banks and the World War I Agricultural Price Shock

“…Rajan and Ramcharan (2015a) show that, for a given shock to commodity prices, counties with more banks experienced larger increases in farmland value than counties with fewer banks, and subsequently, those counties experienced larger declines in land value through the 1930s and a lower level of land prices as late as 1960. 31 Further, Rajan and Ramcharan (2016) find that bank suspensions depressed land values during the 1920s. To limit potential endogeneity, Rajan and Ramcharan employ an identification strategy that involves including suspension rates in both the reference county and in neighboring counties in another state in their regression, under the assumption that suspensions in out-of-state counties capture the impact of economic activity and credit demand, whereas in-state suspensions reflect both credit demand and supply effects.…”

“…Thus, even where permitted by law, branching was extremely limited and largely irrelevant for the agricultural banks and regions that we study. 5 By the early 20 th century, commodity markets were highly integrated within the United States and U.S. markets were well integrated with world commodity markets (see, e.g.,Williamson 1996;Federico and Persson 2007;Sharp and Weisdorf 2013). The sharp increases, and subsequent decreases, in world prices associated with the external demand shock of World War I largely drove changes in U.S. crop prices and greatly overshadowed local variation in prices (United States Department of Agriculture 1922).…”

Information transmission under increasing political tensions—Evidence from the Berlin Produce Exchange 1887–1896

“…Nevertheless, we analyze the wheat market for the following reasons: The most important one is that the modern literature on the suspension of the Berlin produce exchange use wheat prices (e.g., Jacks, 2007). Additionally, the related literature on the integration of early commodity markets (see, e.g., Bateman, 2011; Sharp & Weisdorf, 2013; Uebele, 2011), and on the influence of speculation in commodity markets (see, e.g., Gilbert & Pfuderer, 2014; Hamilton & Wu, 2015; Irwin & Sanders, 2011, 2012; Kim, 2015; Manera et al, 2013, 2016) is usually based on or incorporates wheat prices, while rye is used much less frequently. In an effort to provide comparability and continuity with the literature, we therefore rely on an analysis of wheat prices.…”