We argue that Danish agriculture provides an ideal opportunity to understand how and why modern accounting emerged. Denmark underwent an unusually rapid and successful agricultural transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely based on dairying, for which we present unique...

PhD dissertation summary forthcoming at: European Review of Economic History

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in...

Since Adam Smith, most economists have held the belief that trade fosters economic growth, although it has not been possible to establish a strong causal relationship. The results of growth regressions are, at best, mixed, and several historical studies have found a positive relationship between...

This paper analyses the long-term relationship between regional inequality and economic development. Our data set includes information on national and regional per-capita GDP for four countries: France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Data are compiled on a decadal basis for the period 1860-2010,...

What are the gains from trade today compared to those in the globalisation hundred years ago? To answer this question I rely on Krugman's (1980) idea that consumers value growing import variety, and very granular German product-level data from the first globalisation (ahead of World War I), and...

Historical estimates of workers' earnings suffer from the fundamental problem that annual incomes are inferred from day wages without knowing the length of the working year. This uncertainty raises doubts about core growth theories that rely on existing income estimates to explain the origins of...

This paper investigates the relationship between the capital share in national income and personal income inequality over the long run. Using a new historical cross-country database on capital shares in 19 countries and data from the World Wealth and Income Database, we find strong long-run...

This paper presents our data-base on world trade from 1800 to 1938. We have collected or estimated series of imports and exports, at current and constant (1913) prices and at current and at constant (1913) borders, for 149 polities. After a short review of the available series, we describe the...

I provide the first annual time series of coin and money supply estimates for about six hundred years of English history. I propose two main estimation methods. The first, which I call the 'direct method', is used to measure the value of government-provided, legal-tender coin supply only....