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"This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Modalsli, J. (2017). Intergenerational Mobility in Norway, 1865–2011. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 119(1), 34-71, which has been published in final form at doi:10.1111/sjoe.12196 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions." There are large differences in intergenerational mobility between countries. Little is known, however, about how persistent such differences are, and how they evolve over time. This paper constructs a data set of 835,537 linked father–son pairs from census records and documents a substantial increase in intergenerational occupational mobility in Norway between 1865 and 2011. The increase is most pronounced in non‐farm occupations. The findings show that long‐run mobility developments previously described for the US and UK are not necessarily representative for other countries, and that high mobility in a given country today need not reflect high mobility before industrialization. Support from the Research Council of Norway is acknowledged.

The question of price level versus inflation targeting remains controversial. Disagreement concerns, not so much the desirability of price stability, but rather the means of achieving it. Irving Fisher argued for a commodity dollar standard where the purchasing power of money was fixed by indexing it to a basket of commodities. We show that movements in the price of silver closely track the movements in overall prices during the classical gold standard era. The one-to-one relationship between paper and silver bonds suggests that a simple "silver rule" could have sufficed to fix the purchasing power of money.

We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes which began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are at the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage registers reveal an important increase in literacy; historians measure an acceleration of economic growth. We develop an endogenous growth model with a realistic survival law in which rising longevity increases individual incentives to invest in education and fosters growth. We quantitatively estimate that the observed improvements in adult mortality account for 70% of the growth acceleration in the pre-industrial age.

In this paper, we re-examine the effect of smallpox on the height attained by those who suffered from this disease. To this end, we analyse a dataset assembled by Floud, Wachter and Gregory on the height of recruits into the Marine Society, 1770-1873. Using both time series and cross-sectional analysis, we show that smallpox was indeed an important determinant of height: those who had suffered from smallpox were significantly shorter. This suggests that the increase in heights documented by Floud et al. may be explained not just by increased nutritional intake, but also by the eradication of smallpox.