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Studies of consumption in early modern Europe fall into two groups. Some have looked at the overall supply of nutritional components to the average consumer in an attempt to trace standards of living. Others have examined the changing demand for particular goods by specific consumers to understand the way in which new goods and cultural and taste changes impacted on the economy. Few have tried to look at the interactions between both. By combining the contradictory evidence coming from supply and demand sides, new interpretations of the evidence emerge. Data on the supply of dried salted codfish (bacalao) to the Iberian markets and data available on the consumption of this good by specific groups of consumers are used to explain how this fish became a staple foodstuff in the Iberian diet. The existing literature has invoked both religion and cheapness as explanatory variables. This paper argues that both played an important role but that the overall increase was ultimately driven by the slow but continuous integration of more consumers into the market between 1600 and 1800.

Despite some disagreements about specific timing, it is now widely accepted that France was the first European country to experience a systematic decline in fertility, a decline that took place in a very distinctive geographical pattern. Whereas two areas of low birth rates (the Seine valley and the Aquitaine region) kept spreading, two 'islands' of high fertility (Bretagne and the Massif Central) shrank until they more or less disappeared in the early 1900s. In an attempt to provide a sensible explanation of this pattern, we build an agent-based simulation model which incorporates both historical data on population characteristics and spatial informaton on the geography of France, and allows us to study the role of social influence in fertility decisions. We assess how different behavioural assumptions and network topologies cause variations in diffusion patterns, using quantitative data on the Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 to proxy for the impact of the Revolution. Analysis of several simulations shows that a combination of both endogenous and exogenous factors help to explain the way in which the diffusion took place and suggests some of the mechanisms through which this was materialised.

This study provides statistical evidence that Russian rural/urban wages diverged substantially during the industrialization of Russia in the late nineteenth century. However, over time both the variation declined and integration somewhat increased as rural labour responded to new opportunities. The patterns were moderately clear for nominal wages. This study supports Paul Gregory`s conclusion that relative advances in the productivity of land in agriculture were accompanied by far greater mobility of labour than is commonly thought in view of the constraints of Russia`s rural institutions.

We study the effect of divisions within the elite on the probability of internalconflict in the Papal States between 1295 and 1846. We assemble a new databaseusing information on cardinals that participated in conclaves during this period,and construct measures of polarization and fractionalization based on the cardinals’places of birth. The deaths of popes and cardinals provide plausible exogenousvariation in the timing of the conclave and the composition of the Collegeof Cardinals, which we exploit to analyze the causal effect of a divided conclaveon conflict. We find that an increase of one standard deviation in our measure ofpolarization raised the likelihood of internal conflict by between 2 and 3 percentin a given year and by up to 18 percent in a given papacy. The effect is largestin the initial years after the conclave, to gradually vanish over time. Our resultsconfirm that cardinals’ influence on the politics of the Papal States decreased afterreforms introduced between 1586 and 1588. Our measure of religious productivity,however, is negatively and significantly linked to polarization in the post-reformperiod. These reforms were successful in shifting the effect of divisions among theelite of one of the largest and oldest organizations from violent conflict to religiousmatters.

"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.

We examine how the introduction of smallpox vaccination affected early-life mortality and fertility in Sweden during the first half of the 19th century. We demonstrate that parishes in counties with higher levels of smallpox mortality prior to the introduction of vaccination experienced a greater decline in infant mortality afterwards. Exploiting this finding in an instrumental-variable approach reveals that this decline had a negative effect on the birth rate, while the number of surviving children and population growth remained unaffected. These results suggest that the decline in early-life mortality cannot account for the onset of the fertility decline in Sweden.

In many Dutch cities there are Geert Groote schools. This is no coincidence, because Geert Groote's (1340-1384) ideas form the foundation of modern education in the Netherlands and many other countries. Much less known is that his investments, and those of his followers, have put the Netherlands on the pathway towards the Golden Age. In this study, we describe the mechanism by which the influence of Groote so impressive. Furthermore, we present econometric estimates that indicate a long-lasting legacy. This research provides an explanation for high literacy, economic growth and societal developments in the Netherlands in the period before the Dutch Republic. We establish a link between the Brethren of the Common Life (BCL), a religious community founded by Geert Groote in the city of Deventer in the late fourteenth century, and the early development of the Netherlands. The BCL stimulated human capital accumulation by educating Dutch citizens without inducing animosity from the dominant Roman Catholic Church or other political rulers. Human capital had an impact on the structure of economic development in the period immediately after 1400. The educated workforce put pressure on the Habsburg monarchy leading to economic and religious resentment and eventually to the Revolt in 1572. The analyses show that the BCL contributed to the high rates of literacy in the Netherlands. In addition, there are positive effects of the BCL on book production and on city growth in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Finally, we find that cities with BCL-roots were more likely to join the Dutch Revolt. These findings are supported by regressions that use distance to Deventer as an instrument for the presence of BCL. The results are robust to a number of alternative explanations. The statistical programme used for the regression analysis and the data used for this research can also be downloaded below (attachment, if necessary rename the file as a .zip).

By making the most of a newly-available large set of historical statistics, the paper outlines the main features of Italy’s «modern economic growth» from Unification (1861) until the present day (2011). Alongside national GDP estimates, we also discuss regional disparities, living standards and inequality of personal income distribution. Over the long run, Italy successfully caught up with the most advanced economies, and did so in a virtuous manner: despite the persistence of the regional imbalance, at the national level economic growth was accompanied by a secular decline in income inequality. This pattern has come to a halt: during the last two decades, stagnation in GDP per capita has been mirrored by an unprecedented decline in productivity; southern regions have further lagged behind the rest of the country, and income inequality is on the rise. Italy has entered a phase of relative economic decline.

The world population growth increased in the eighteenth century, which caused real wages to decline in most countries. Eli Heckscher held the view that Swedish population growth was quite low in the seventeenth century, similar to the development in the rest of Europe, and that there was a substantial acceleration after 1720. Recent data for Sweden by Lennart Andersson Palm entail that population growth was stronger in the seventeenth century than in the eighteenth century. However, this is at variance with other types of economic data. For example, Swedish real wages increased during the seventeenth century and fell in the eighteenth century. This study attempts to resolve the anomaly and argues that Palm’s estimates of Swedish population and mortality rates are too low for the seventeenth century. It presents revised annual demographic data for Sweden for the pre-census period, back to 1630. The new data indicate that there was a small acceleration in early modern population growth, due to the decreased occurrence of mortality crises, but the acceleration was not as pronounced as in the rest of the world.

The well-being of a person is reflected in the language used. Building on 1,400 letters written by three famous music composers, I obtain well-being indices that span their lifetime. The validity of this methodology is shown by linking the indices with biographical information and through estimation of the determinants of well-being. I find, consistent with the literature, that work-related engagements and accomplishments are positively related with well-being, while poor health or death of a relative is detrimental. I then exploit the data and provide quantitative evidence on the existence of a causal impact of negative emotions on outstanding creativity, an association hypothesized across several disciplines since the Antiquity; however, not yet convincingly established for the case of extraordinary achievers.

This paper explores a key implication of Richard Smith's work on agrarian societies: the need to be attentive both to rural people's decisions as economic agents and to the constraints on their choices. It begins by examining evidence of goal-maximizing behaviour by rural people – not just peasant farmers but women, servants, serfs, landless workers, youths, and many others – in a diversity of pre-industrial societies. It then analyses some central constraints within which rural people made their choices: family and inheritance systems, village communities, manorial systems, legal rules and customs, and the actions of rulers. It concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding the functioning of rural economies, now widely recognized as central to long-term improvements in economic growth and human well-being.

The ubiquitous forms of address for women, 'Mrs' and 'Miss' are both abbreviations of 'mistress'. Although mistress is a term with a multiplicity of meanings, in early modern England it most commonly designated the female equivalent of master - that is, a person with capital who directed servants or apprentices. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, there was only Mrs (or Mris, Ms, or other forms of abbreviation), and it was applied to any adult woman who merited the social distinction, without any marital connotation. Miss was reserved for young girls until then. Through the eighteenth century, Mrs most often designated a woman with a business or commercial skill. Even when fashionable adult single women started to use Miss in the 1740s, Mrs still designated a social or business standing, regardless of marital status, until at least the mid-nineteenth century. This article demonstrates the changes in nomenclature over time, and argues that the distinctions are important for historians to understand in order to place women designated Mrs in the past in their economic and social context.

We present a new theory and quantitative evidence on the incidence of unigeniture. Existing theories hypothesize some sort of indivisibility or increasing returns to scale in wealth to overcome the testator’s inclination toward equal sharing among heirs. Examining a micro-level data set of seventeenth-century English wills, we find that even after controlling for land and other presumed sources of increasing returns to scale and indivisibility, other variables such as financial wealth still correlate with the incidence of unigeniture. This leads us to propose a model where unigeniture is an efficient way to provide insurance against income shocks. An important implication of the theory is that observed unequal bequests are partially counteracted by ex post transfers. Therefore, inequality of bequests cannot be taken as evidence of inequality of consumption between heirs.

We present new data documenting medieval Europe’s Commercial Revolution using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany’s first universities after 1386 following the papal schism. We find that the trend rate of market establishment breaks upward in 1386 and this break is greatest where the distance to a university shrank most. There is no differential pre-1386 trend associated with the reduction in distance to a university, and there is no break in trend in 1386 where university proximity did not change. These results are robust to estimating a variety of specifications that address concerns about the endogeneity of university location. Universities provided training in newly rediscovered Roman and canon law; students with legal training served in positions that reduced the uncertainty of trade in the Middle Ages. We argue that training in the law, and the consequent development of legal and administrative institutions, was an important channel linking universities and greater economic activity in medieval Germany.

Building on recent work by Collins et al.. this paper aims to explain the failure of corporate and public initiatives to alleviate poverty before the twentieth century by unravelling the financial rationale behind the various combinations of private efforts, family and neighbourhood help, financial intermediation, and government intervention tried by poor households in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. There existed several financial institutions whose functioning was very similar to modern microfinance institutions, yet none of them were in a position to help the poor. We find that in the Netherlands the boundary of formal financial markets moved down not because of financial innovation, but because of economic growth pushing up wages. Until the last quarter of the 19th-century poor households simply lacked the money to use newly established mutual insurances, savings- and loan banks.

The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper seeks to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis that instruments for omitted variable bias with a city's distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were at minimum 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During World War I (1914–1918) the birth rate in France fell by 50%. The corresponding deficit of births is estimated at 1.4 million, while military losses are estimated at 1.4 million too. Thus, the fertility decline doubled the demographic impact of the war. I construct a model of fertility choices where a household faces three shocks in a war: (i) an increased probability that its wife remains alone after the war; (ii) a partially-compensated loss of its husband’s income; and (iii) a decline in labor productivity followed by faster growth. I calibrate the model’s parameters to the time series of fertility before the war. I use military casualties and income data to calibrate the war. The model accounts for 91% of the observed decline, and overpredicts the subsequent rebound in fertility by 4%. The increased probability of a husband dying is the leading force behind the results.

Since the pioneering study of Le Roy Ladurie and his team, the idea that mean height can be considered as a reliable indicator of the standard of living has emerged from a long debate among historians and economists. Considering height in this respect, nineteenth-century France, unlike most Western countries, did not pay an urban penalty. Thanks to a substantial set of individual data (105,324 observations), based on the draft lottery of Frenchmen born in the year 1848, we are able to prove that this “French exception” did not, in fact, exist. The larger the town, the shorter were the conscripts. Among the towns, Paris had the shortest conscripts. By combining individual data with the agricultural survey of 1852, we are able to identify those factors that compensated for this urban penalty—that were positively correlated with height: nutritional availability, the literacy rate, and life expectancy.

This paper is based on the difference between the formal introduction of a Weberian bureaucracy and its actual implementation through state officials. This difference between the formal institutional framework and its actual implementation could lead to failed reforms. On the other side, there were states which successfully introduced a Weberian bureaucracy like the German state of Baden in the nineteenth century. This paper argues that Civil Service reforms in Baden during the first two decades of the nineteenth century established an internal labor market with a hierarchy of pay levels and clearly defined rules of promotion. These rules of promotion made advancement in the hierarchy, and therefore, an increase in remuneration, inter alia dependent on the performance in regard to administrative processes and rules of professional conduct. This rule generated an incentive to implement the new formal institutional framework, because sticking to the rules led to a monetary reward. The paper tests this hypothesis empirically using a logit as well as a panel regression approach. In doing so, I find that a positive assessment about a district magistrate’s (Amtmann) performance in regard to formal administrative processes and rules of professional conduct increased his probability of promotion by 81 %. The paper also finds incentive mechanisms like a shirking wage. However, it seems that the sound working of these incentive mechanisms took ca. two decades.

Using census-based data on the ability to recall one's age, we show that low levels of nutrition impaired numeracy in industrializing England, 1780 to 1850: cognitive ability declined among those born during the Napoleonic wars. The effect was stronger in areas where grain was expensive and relief for the poor, an early form of welfare support was limited. Nutritional shortages had a nonlinear effect on numeracy, with, severe shortages impairing numeracy more. Nutrition during childhood also mattered for labor market outcomes: individuals born in periods or counties with low numeracy typically worked in occupations with lower earnings.© 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A crisis that started as a textbook case of how financial and asset markets can spin out of control without adequate public oversight has transmuted in 5 years into a crisis of irresponsible sovereigns, such that restoring prosperity requires that governments re-establish control over their own excessive spending. How did this happen? This paper explains the recovery of position by pro-market, restricted-government proponents in economics on the basis of political divides and segmented lines of communication within the academic economics profession. These political divides involve a double invisibilization of power within economics: an invisibilization both of the political purposes served by a profession whose leading models deny the relevance of social and political power, and of the ideational barriers to entry into ‘mainstream’ departments. The argument is motivated and illustrated by the cases of the subprime and the eurozone crises.

Available online 12 May 2013 We document and suggest a rationale for the durability of seasonal migration from Poland to Germany, a phenomenon persisting for more than a century. We refer to the role of the tradition of engaging in seasonal migration as a force that helped invigorate the process and contribute to its sustainability even when, to different degrees and at different times, the process was interrupted by a shifting political, regulatory, and legal environment. Evidence in support of the role of tradition is provided, among other things, by the continuation of the seasonal flow of migrants from once border regions - which became internal regions following WWII - despite the fact that since the redrawing of the German-Polish border, proximity is no longer a factor encouraging repeated, short-term seasonal moves. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Inc. JEL classification: F22 J22 J43 J61 N3 N33 N34 N93 N94

This paper presents a new picture of the labor market effects of technological change in pre-WWII United States. I show that, similar to the recent computerization episode, the electrification of the manufacturing sector led to a "hollowing out" of the skill distribution whereby workers in the middle of the distribution lost out to those at the extremes. To conduct this analysis, a new dataset detailing the task composition of occupations in the United States for the period 1880-1940 was constructed using information about the task content of over 4,000 occupations from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1949). This unique data was used to measure the skill content of electrification in U.S. manufacturing. OLS estimates show that electrification increased the demand for clerical, numerical, planning and people skills relative to manual skills while simultaneously reducing relative demand for the dexterity-intensive jobs which comprised the middle of the skill distribution. Thus, early twentieth century technological change was unskill-biased for blue collar tasks but skill-biased on aggregate. These results are in line with the downward trend in wage differentials within U.S. manufacturing up to 1950. To overcome any threat to the exogeneity of the electricity measure, due for example to endogenous technological change, 2 instrumental variable strategies were developed. The first uses cross-state differences in the timing of adoption of state-level utility regulation while the second exploits differences in state-level geography that encouraged the development of hydro-power generation and thus made electricity cheaper. The results from these regressions support the main conclusions of the paper.

The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe's, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century. We extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10,000 nationally-representative British and US fathers and sons. The US was more mobile than Britain through 1900, so in the experience of those who created the US welfare state in the 1930s, the US had indeed been “exceptional.” The US mobility lead over Britain was erased by the 1950s, as US mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)

Inter-continental trade brought a novel form of organizing business to early modern Europe: the multinational firm. Headquartered in Europe and operating in Asia, the success of the East India Companies depended largely on the management of overseas outposts and their corresponding labor force. Using a dataset of 115 individuals hired in Europe to work in Asia, I present the internal structure of the careers and wages of civil servants in the Dutch East India Company in the eighteenth century. There were stable career paths, fast tracks in promotions, and sizable returns to tenure. Despite the 300-year-old evidence, the VOC conforms rather well with present personnel practices and theories of internal labor markets.

International audience; Scale economies and demand, combined with the relative prices of input factors, can provide an economic explanation to the location and timing of the Industrial Revolution. Its labor-saving innovations were profitable only above a minimum output threshold, which allowed to cover the upfront cost of capital. In turn, the possibility to exceed such threshold depended on consumer demand, which was affected by the level and by the distribution of real income. The case of the spinning jenny and the cotton industry in England and France serves as a valuable case study to show how scale and demand considerations might have mattered even at the eve of the Industrial Revolution, thus implying also a potentially important role for income distribution.

We analyze under what conditions intermarriage can be used as an indicator of tolerance, and whether such tolerant attitudes persisted in Germany during the twentieth century. We find strong evidence for the persistence of tolerant attitudes towards intermarriage with Jews. At the same time, our empirical analysis also cautions against using intermarriage as a simple proxy for tolerance: The size of Jewish communities in the early twentieth century is an important confounding factor.

We respond to several criticisms by Avery Guest and Michael Hout (2013) and Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald (2013) to Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie (2013). We do not dispute Guest and Hout's characterization of the importance of total mobility in addition to relative mobility. We find much in their additional analyses that supports our original findings. In response to Xie and Killewald, we discuss the limitations of our data and the conceptualization of mobility. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where in the sixteenth century a hitherto homogeneous region was split and one part assigned to adopt Protestantism. We find that Reformed Protestantism reduces refer enda voting for more leisure by 14, redistribution by 5, and government intervention by 7 percentage points. These preferences translate into higher per capita income as well as greater income inequality. (JEL D12, D31, D72, H23, N33, Z12) St. Paul’s ‘He who will not work shall not eat’ holds unconditionally for everyone. Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace. Here the difference from the mediaeval view-point becomes quite evident. — Max Weber, 1930

Charity, the core of the Gospel ethos, became one of the founding ideas of European civilization and distinguished it from others. In Polish territories, as in other Western European countries, charity work was conducted primarily by the Church, which together with its sense of Gospel duty, defended the weak by concerning itself with economic development. For this purpose, charitable credit institutions, so-called mounts of piety (montes pietatis), were established. They were continued by reformers, in a somewhat changed form, until the decline of the Polish Commonwealth (Republic). The most original institution of this kind was Rev. Stanis³aw Staszic’s foundation: the Hrubieszów Agricultural Society, which survived until the days of the Polish People’s Republic.

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions. Positive shocks in the textile, iron, and coal industries increased prosecutions. Following the abolition of criminal sanctions, wages differentially rose in counties that had experienced more prosecutions, and wages responded more to labor demand shocks. Coercive contract enforcement was applied in industrial Britain; restricted mobility allowed workers to commit to risk-sharing contracts with lower, but less volatile, wages. (JEL J31, J41, K12, K31, N33, N43)

The characteristics of the structure of agrarian estate follow certain major coordinates in Romania between 1866-1947, such as the increase of the great agrarian estate, the process of division and multiplication of the small peasant households, the gradual development of the rural bourgeoisie and the decrease of the surface of state-owned estate through the sales of land. The coordinates of the peasantry issue range from the peasants' endemic craving for land (the peasant who cultivates the great estate with his own tools and cattle) towards „the great capitalist in agriculture”. The fundamental solutions for the peasantry issue alternated between the slow reformist method, emerging from „above”, and the radical method, of complete „economic and political renewal”.

Western Europe surged ahead of the rest of the world long before technological growth became rapid. Europe in 1500 already had incomes twice as high on a per capita basis as Africa, and one-third greater than most of Asia. In this essay, we explain how Europe's tumultuous politics and deadly penchant for warfare translated into a sustained advantage in per capita incomes. We argue that Europe's rise to riches was driven by the nature of its politics after 1350—it was a highly fragmented continent characterized by constant warfare and major religious strife. No other continent in recorded history fought so frequently, for such long periods, killing such a high proportion of its population. When it comes to destroying human life, the atomic bomb and machine guns may be highly efficient, but nothing rivaled the impact of early modern Europe's armies spreading hunger and disease. War therefore helped Europe's precocious rise to riches because the survivors had more land per head available for cultivation. Our interpretation involves a feedback loop from higher incomes to more war and higher land-labor ratios, a loop set in motion by the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century.

The prevailing explanation for why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in Britain is Robert Allen’s (2009) ‘high†wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This paper presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the Industrial Revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high†wage economy’ in spinning, a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry in the Early Modern period with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Our results show that spinning was a widespread, low†wage, low†productivity employment, in line with the Humphries (2013) view of the motivations for the factory system.

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.

This paper reconstructs an annual volume series of GDP and GDP per capita for Sweden within present borders 1620–1800, extending the annual series that exist from 1800 onwards. Annual fluctuations of GDP are estimated from the annual fluctuations of harvests, which in the nineteenth century were strongly correlated with each other. Long-term trends are determined based on estimates of the values added of various activities for a few benchmark years. The paper shows that the long-term trend of GDP per capita increased modestly during the studied period, a different development from real wages that fell substantially. Henceforth, available data on real wages are at best a quite weak indicator of the development of GDP per capita. If Sweden is representative of Western Europe, the new data indicate a somewhat slower growth than assumed by Maddison. The increase in GDP per capita occurred in the seventeenth century and came entirely from non-agricultural activities, especially mining, public services, trade and transports. The lack of dynamism in the aggregate economy is explained by the dominance of agriculture. Per capita agricultural production displayed a stagnating tendency. Nevertheless, the expansion of the population in the eighteenth century was largely made possible by the increased use of iron tools in agriculture. Without technological progress, the strong population growth would probably have led to decreased per capita production.

The Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires had a similar geographic distribution with outposts all around the Indian Ocean, which they controlled and manned. Both empires faced the same problem of monitoring their agents in remote corners of the world. Each, however, arrived at a different solution to the monitoring problem. I use a principal–agent model to link different monitoring options to the different organizational structures of the two empires. I further investigate the implications of the model with archival data on labor compensation for Portuguese and Dutch workers overseas.

Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence—mostly from British textile industries—however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia uses a unique school enrollment and factory employment database linking 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Using pre-industrial education as instrument for later education and controlling extensively for pre-industrial development, we find that basic education is significantly associated with nontextile industrialization in both phases of the Industrial Revolution. Panel data models with county fixed effects confirm the results. (JEL I20, J24, N13, N33, N63)

The landlord system and the limits of liberal Spanish monetary policy in the first half of the 19th centuryThis paper aims to deepen the understanding of the transition from traditional to modern monetary systems and its impact on economic growth in the Spanish economy over the first half of the nineteenth century. The main sources on which the study of this period’s monetary policy is based, are, among others, the proceedings of the parliamentary committee; during the Trienio Liberal, these related to a draft for the complete reform of the monetary system inherited from the Antiguo régimen, whose results would be constrained by three factors: firstly, by the persistence of traditional institutions; secondly, by difficulties in linking this monetary reform with the discussions that were taking place in the more developed countries, particularly in England; and, thirdly, the short duration of the period in which it took place, and the restoration of the old monetary policy with the Tarifa de Tolosa in 1823. Este trabajo pretende profundizar en la comprensión, para el caso español, del tránsito del sistema monetario tradicional al moderno y sus repercusiones en el crecimiento económico de la economía española a lo largo de la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Tomamos como punto de inflexión el Trienio Liberal y su proyecto de reforma del sistema monetario español heredado del Antiguo Régimen. A continuación analizamos la persistencia del sistema monetario tradicional hasta la reforma del 1848 y la estrecha relación entre los límites de la política monetaria liberal y la pervivencia de unas estructuras productivas y sociales tradicionales

A period of two and a half millennia separates us from the Classical period of ancient Greece. Nevertheless, looking at ancient Greek medicine from the perspective of modern health economics is an interesting endeavour in that it increases our understanding of the ancient world and provides insights into contemporary society. Ancient Greece is rightly famous for pioneering secular and scientific medicine, but equally noteworthy is the prominence of healing cults, such as that of Asklepios. In this paper, the market for secular physicians is illuminated with tools from modern economics, for example the concern for the physician’s reputation. The simultaneous emergence in ancient Greece of a scientific and rational approach to medicine and the proliferation of religious medicine provides an interesting vantage point for a study of the current market for alternative medicine. Similar circumstances arguably lie behind the dual nature of the health market that was present then and is still present now. The underlying mechanism in both periods is hypothesised to be increased uncertainty in everyday life. (Less)

The duchy of Bukovina has expe rienced a great development after obtaining its autonomy. The new status and the internal organization allowed Bukovina to significantly reduce the gap in developme nt with other provinces of the Empire. Unfortunately, the autonomy of the province of Bukovina in the Empire was a short one and the reduction of the gap in economic development was not enough to surpass other provinces. The great conflict at the beginning of the XXth century changed everything as the industry of the province was mostly destroyed and the union with Romania led to the loss of its autonomy.

For several centuries before the First World War women's age at first marriage in the west of Europe was higher than in the east (and in the rest of the world). In their low mortality regimes Western Europeans chose lower fertility in part through a higher female age at marriage. This allowed women to increase their human capital both formally and informally in the years before child bearing so that more informed mothers brought up better educated offspring. The demographic pattern influenced the stock of human capital and directly contributed to Western Europe's development advantage. The predicted relations of this economic model of the household are tested with two datasets, one at the county level for England for the second half of the nineteenth century and the other at the national level for Europe 1870–1910.

This article analyses the contribution of the second wave of immigrants to the United States to the formation of the young American people. Unlike other states, the USA is a nation founded on waves of immigrants coming from different parts of the world. This paper includes the second wave of immigrants in US history in the four waves and presents the migration of the Irish and Germans to the USA at the middle of the 19th century. They had an important contribution to the increase of American population and were a source of consumption and workforce for agriculture and various industries.

The annexation of Bukovina by the Habsburg Empire was a decisive moment for its economic and social evolution. The measures taken by the new administration, right after 1775, created the basis for a rapid economic development, which had positive effects on the standard of living and the quality of life in the region. The administrative reform, the transformation of the legal system, the investments in infrastructure, the new fiscal rules, as well as all the other economic policies which were promoted, generated a considerable economic progress. However, we shouldn’t omit the contribution of the human factor, the period analyzed in this paper being characterized by deep demographic transformations. Economically, after the occupation of the province, Bukovina underwent spectacular transformation, stimulated by the development of infrastructure and by the influx of specialists from other parts of the empire, as well as by the new opportunities offered by the market and the State’s policies promoting certain fields of activity. Industry recorded the most spectacular growth, the most dynamic industries being breweries, distilleries, milling, logging, the production of glass and paper etc. At the same time, the discovery of some pitch pits, salt water springs and peat deposits spurred the development of other industries.

In this paper we argue that the fertility decline that began around 1880 had substantial positive effects on the health of children, as the quality–quantity trade-off would suggest. We use microdata from a unique survey from 1930s Britain to analyse the relationship at the household level between the standardised heights of children and the number of children in the family. Our results suggest that heights are influenced positively by family income per capita and negatively by the number of children or the degree of crowding in the household. The evidence suggests that family size affected the health of children through its influence on both nutrition and disease. Applying our results to long-term trends, we find that rising household income and falling family size contributed significantly to improving child health between 1886 and 1938. Between 1906 and 1938 these variables account for 40% of the increase in heights, and much of this effect is due to falling family size. We conclude that the fertility decline is a neglected source of the rapid improvement in health in the first half of the twentieth century.

This paper provides an overview of the long-term impacts of the Columbian Exchange—that is, the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, technologies, populations, and cultures between the New World and the Old World after Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas in 1492. We focus on the aspects of the exchange that have been most neglected by economic studies; namely the transfer of diseases, food crops, and knowledge between the two Worlds. We pay particular attention to the effects of the exchange on the Old World.

What would happen if every individual knew what to do, and did, without prompting or expecting a reward? Is that not what the authors of Republic and Utopia had in mind? Is that not the primary justification of theocracies? The immediate objection to that postulate is that human nature is not suitable for team activities at all times. There is such a conception as individualism and that is the quality abetting creativity that marks humanism. Besides, the definition of human rights guarantees freedom of choice not to cooperate if one chooses against it.

The German firm of Siemens and Halske introduced many enterprising features of what later came to be known as welfare capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Profit sharing, annual bonuses, a pension fund, a reduction in work hours, and an annual party were all means to ensure a productive, trouble-free workforce. We investigate the reasons why Siemens and Halske introduced this internal welfare system. We focus on the by-far most expensive part of the welfare system: the pension fund introduced in 1872, more than a decade before the nationwide social security system was implemented in Germany. We find that the adoption of the internal welfare system increased labor productivity, and in addition discouraged workers from striking. We estimate that the company’s gains due to strike prevention and higher productivity were at least as high as the cost of the pension fund. This suggests that (1) the introduction of a pension fund is not inconsistent with simple profit maximizing behavior on the firm’s side and (2) increased labor unionization induced firms to introduce subjective components of workers’ remuneration packages.

The modern world is the product of two momen tous changes: the Industrial Revolution of 1800, which brought sustained efficiency advances in economies, and the Demographic Transition of 1900, which channeled those efficiency advances mainly into increased income per capita, instead of increases in population. How these revolutions were connected has been a persistent unsolved puzzle in the history of growth. The Demographic Transition was achieved without any improve ment in contraceptive technologies from those of 1800 and earlier. It was a possibility for all preindustrial societies. Why did it occur only after the Industrial Revolution? The key component of the Malthusian econ

This paper argues that Malthusian regimes are capable of sustained changes in per capita incomes. Shifting mortality and fertility schedules can lead to different steady-state income levels, with long periods of growth during the transition. Europe checked the downward pressure on wages through late marriage, which reduced fertility, and a mortality regime that combined high death rates with high incomes. We argue that both emerged as a result of the Black Death.