This paper presents new time series estimates of GDP, capital stock and education-adjusted employment, and uses a growth accounting approach to analyze GDP growth during 1880-2008. The growth of capital stock, employment and educational attainment explained almost all of GDP growth. During key...

Medieval bishops condemned and restricted the sale of corrodies (a type of annuity), partly on the grounds of their perceived unprofitability. The available data on the profitability of corrodies is limited and little analysed, and the episcopal condemnation of corrodies has been adopted by...

A vast economic history literature suggests that medieval institutions supporting contract enforcement were necessary for impersonal exchange to emerge. Yet this literature cannot account for the bill of exchange, an important financial instrument that had positive legal standing in both the...

This paper measures the effects of public expenditures on literacy in early 20th century British India. Using a new dataset and an instrumental variables strategy, I find that public investments in primary education had positive and statistically significant effects on literacy. A 10 percent...

The rise of state ownership was one of the most significant policy changes in the railway sector in the early 20th century. This paper estimates the cost inefficiency of railway sectors across countries using stochastic frontier models and examines whether the rise of state ownership affected...

The future looked bright for Argentina in the early twentieth century. It had already achieved high levels of income per capita and was moving away from authoritarian government towards a more open democracy. Unfortunately, Argentina never finished the transition. The turning point occurred in...

Following the standard industry-of-origin methodology to measure production-side purchasing power parities (PPPs), this study for the first time provides a set of unit value ratios (UVRs) of manufacturing products between China, Japan, Korea and the US, based on which it derives PPP estimates...

The emergence of an integrated national economy in Indonesia has been a slow and ongoing evolutionary process. Using rice price series for a number of cities across the Indonesian archipelago, this paper provides quantitative evidence to track this process for the specific case of the rice...

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...

I study the slow adoption of ring spinning in Great Britain's cotton industry at the end of the 19th century, which has been used as evidence of British entrepreneurs' declining efficiency and conservatism (Musson, 1959; Aldcroft, 1964; Lazonick, 1981, 1981b). To this purpose I use firm-level data from...