Although urban growth historically depended on large inflows of migrants, little is known of the process of migration in the era before railways. Here we use detailed data for Paris on women arrested for prostitution in the 1760s, or registered as prostitutes in the 1830s and 1850s; and of men...

The experiences of Latin American countries are not fully incorporated into current debates concerning the age of mass migration even though 13 million Europeans migrated to the region between 1870 and 1930. This paper draws together different aspects of the Latin America immigration experience....

In Malthusian economies, crop shortages could be a matter of life and death. The development of regional and national markets for grain held the potential to provide insurance against the demographic consequences of local crop failure. Weather shocks that are reflected in price data, however,...

This paper presents annual stock market capitalization data for 17 advanced economies from 1870 to today. Extending our knowledge beyond individual benchmark years in the seminal work of Rajan and Zingales (2003) reveals a striking new time series pattern: over the long run, the evolution of...

We construct the first time-series for Portugal's per capita GDP for 1527-1850, drawing on a new database. Starting in the early 1630s there was a highly persistent upward trend which accelerated after 1710 and peaked 40 years later. At that point, per capita income was high by European...

It is generally acknowledged that the degree to which women participate in labour markets and how they are remunerated are important determinants of female autonomy that may also affect their demographic behaviour. Such links have been discussed in the literature about the "European Marriage...

This study looks at human capital in Spain during the early stages of modern economic growth. In order to do so, we have assembled a new dataset on ageheaping and literacy in Spain for both men and women between 1877 and 1930 based on six population censuses with information for 49 provinces....

The objective of this paper is to explain, from a cliometric perspective, the determinants of the growth of Argentina's exports between 1880 and 1929. To do this, we have constructed a gravity model with the principal products exported each year by Argentina to its most important trading...

Between 1914 and 1918, the Ottoman Empire was involved in the First World War, which caused economic disruptions, huge budget deficits, surmounted inflation rates and excessive devaluation of Lira, the Ottoman currency. Based on the value of Lira against the currencies of three selected...

A common explanation for current African underdevelopment is the extractive character of institutions established during the colonial period. Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify, the magnitude of this phenomenon is still unclear. In this paper, I address this gap in the literature...