Land per capita was one important determinant of height in the Malthusian world 0 to 1800 A.D. A second factor was specialization in milk cattle agriculture. It had two positive effects on human stature: first, proximity to protein production resulted in a very low local shadow price of milk, as...

The literature offers both supply-side and cotton demand-side explanations for the reduced level and growth of income in the postbellum South. Demand-side evidence begins with a single-equation relationship regressing the price of cotton on quantity and a trend term, although subsequent...

A notable feature of the 1920s and 1930s is the volatility in several key macroeconomic aggregates, and this feature used to econometrically identify the reaction of the Fed to stock market developments. The volatility of economic activity may have contributed to deepening the divisions among...

Based on historical evidence found in Juglar and Bonnet that over the Bimetallic period French and British central banks did co-operate when using their discount rates as policy instruments for currency stabilization, we test whether Bimetallism was a regulated system or not. Our revised story...

This paper analyzes and compares different ways of assessing how people perceived impending threats of war in the past. Conventional Nordic historiography of World War II claims there were few, if any, people in the Nordic countries who perceived a significantly increased threat of war between...

This paper studies the apparent inconsistency between the evolution of GDP per capita and real wages in pre-industrial Europe. We show that these two measures will diverge when any of the three following factors are present: changes in income distribution, changes in labour supply per capita and...