Humanities Faculty

Philip T. Hoffman

Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics and Professor of History

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Research interests

Economic history of Europe and the world, economic development, institutional change

Research Statement

Why is it that some countries have grown rich, while others remain mired in abject poverty? What institutions--legal, political, social, and economic--affect economic growth, hindering it or spurring it along? And how do we explain long run historical change in politics, society, and the economy?

As an economic historian, these are the questions that I try to answer, and my current research falls into four areas:

• studying the long run evolution of financial institutions and their effect on economic growth. Some of my research here (including a recently published paper) has focused on the role that trust plays in credit markets in France, but I have also recently finished a broad comparative book manuscript on financial crises and the development of financial institutions.
• convincing historians to borrow tools from the social sciences. I have a recent paper on this subject in the Journal of the Historical Society.
• explaining why the West managed to conquer the rest of the world, a subject that mixes economics, politics, and technological change. I have given a talk on this subject at Oxford, the University of Utrecht, and the Economic History Association meetings.
• analyzing the long run evolution of prices and living standards in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas over the past millennium, the subject of another recently published paper.

Most of these projects involve work with other scholars, and in the last one, I am the member of a large international team.

Publications

Finance, Intermediaries, and Economic Development, edited by Stlanley L. Engerman, Philip T. Hoffman, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Prices and Real Inequality in Europe since 1500, with David Jacks, Patricia Levin and Peter Lindert. The Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 322-355.

Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450--1815 Princeton University Press, 1996; paperback edition, 2000.

Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660-1870 with Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. University of Chicago Press, 2000.