This project investigates three aspects of long-run economic growth: first, the shape of comparative growth over the past century, second, the extent to which broad asset price indices - predominantly stock market indices - forecast actual or expected future economic growth, and third, possible lessons on the links between financial structure and growth taught by the comparison of Great Britain and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. All three parts of this project will extend in significant ways the baseline of information economists have to draw conclusions about the relationship between the structure and performance of financial markets and the shape of long-run growth. Most importantly, the first part of the proposal - the improvement, extension and analysis of the long term data - will generate a new database. This new database would provide a better picture of the shape of productivity advance in the industrial core of the world economy and diffusion to the periphery of new settlement over the past century. It would also provide more accurate and reliable data for future studies of the determinants of long-run growth.
