Most research on the history of inequality in pre-industrial economies has focused on either wealth or income. Characterizing the distribution of wealth (resp., income) is problematic owing to insufficient information about the distribution's low (resp., high) end. Because the sources and...

This paper provides a simplified method of exploring the geographical limits of a knowledge shock over the long run. Using a geographically decomposable distanceweighed sum of world GDPs by county, differences in differences regression analysis shows that a new university will not only have a...

This paper calculates indicators of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) for 17 British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. The resulting indicators show that the late-Victorian 'workshop of the world' was at a marked...

This paper presents the first estimate to date of the anual output of Portugal's agriculture between 1500 and 1850. It adopts the well-known indirect approach, which uses a consumption function for agricultural products. Prices and wages for this come from a recently created data base. It also...

Using the Ensenada Cadastre, a unique database on Castilian households circa 1750, we measure the effect of human capital on the structure of male labor earnings. Human capital is proxied by individual indicators of basic skills (literacy and numeracy) and of occupational skills. We employ a...

The Bank Restriction Act of 1797 suspended the convertibility of the Bank of England's notes into gold. The current historical consensus is that the suspension was a result of the state's need to finance the war, France's remonetization, a loss of confidence in the English country banks, and a...

We provide a theoretical model linking limits to the observability of soil quality to state rulers' ability to tax agricultural output, which leads to a higher political fragmentation. We introduce a spatial measure to quantify state planners' observability in an agricultural society. The model...

For the better part of human history, life was most fragile and death most imminent during infancy and early childhood. The death of a child may be hardly bearable from a humanitarian perspective. Yet, certain currents in economic theory attach a silver lining to high mortality by claiming that...

This essay offers a new set of historical GDP estimates from the demand and supply sides that revises and expands those in Prados de la Escosura (2003) and provides the basis to investigate Spain's long run economic growth. It presents a reconstruction of production and expenditure series for...

We test various hypotheses about the causes of the Little Divergence, using new data and focusing on trends in GDP per capita and urbanization. We find evidence that confirms the hypothesis that human capital formation was the driver of growth, and that institutional changes (in particular the...