Chile and Norway are two 'natural resource intensive economies', which have had different development trajectories, yet are closely similar in industrial structure and geophysical conditions. The questions of how and why Chile and Norway have developed so differently are explored through an...

The paper aims to analyze the effects of plague on the long-term development of Italian cities, with particular attention to the 1629-30 epidemic. By using a new dataset on plague mortality rates in 49 cities covering the period 1575-1700 ca., an economic geography model verifying the existence...

Why did the establishment of cooperative creameries in late nineteenth century Ireland fail to halt the relative decline of her dairy industry compared to other emerging producers? This paper compares the Irish experience with that of the market leader, Denmark, and shows how each adopted the...

The consensus among legal and economic historians that British law between 1844 and 1914 provided little protection to corporate shareholders is based on formal provisions in the Companies Acts. In fact these Acts applied only to companies registered by the Board of Trade. Moreover corporate law...

This study investigates the effect of participative political institutions (PPIs) that emerged in many central European cities from the late 13th century. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on newly compiled long-run data for the existence of different types of PPIs in 104 cities in...

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

In this paper I analyze the 'Nitrogen Paradox' stated by Robert Allen in his interpretation of the English Agricultural Revolution as an adaptive response to the agro-climatic impacts of the last phase of the Little Ice Age. The colder and more humid climate during the second half of the 17th...

This paper presents estimates of the level of per capita GDP and of the distribution of income of preindustrial Poland. This is based on a reconstruction of a social table of the Voivodeship of Cracow for 1578. Our evidence indicates that income in Poland was distributed more equally than in...

How has Latin America's wellbeing evolved over time? How does Latin America compare to today's developed countries (OECD, for short)? What explains their differences? These questions are addressed using an historical index of human development. A sustained improvement in wellbeing can be...

Apart from measuring inequality and poverty at the provincial level in Spain between 1860 and 1930, this paper empirically assesses the relationship between economic growth and both inequality and destitution. The results, on the one hand, confirm the presence of a Kuznets' curve. However,...