"There is scarcely a man of sense and knowledge who would dare to question the supremacy of Tokaji wines over all other European wines." - Selbstherr, a wine merchant from Breslau. This paper examines the transformation of viticulture and estate management in the Tokaj-Hegyalja region of the...

While the influence of neighborhoods on later life outcomes is well documented, the historical processes that shaped the growth and social makeup of urban areas are less understood. We address this by analyzing newly compiled geocoded data covering the entire population of Stockholm from 1878 to...

A growing literature concerns the role of symbolic politics, including how political parties benefit electorally from politicizing the past, a strategy which should be more effective in localities with physical memories of the past. We test this argument by studying the effect of the local...

This paper provides a methodological contribution to the study of historical income inequality by examining the construction and use of social tables for the nineteenth century. In a period when modern household surveys were absent, social tables represent one of the only feasible approaches for...

Despite stagnant economic and living conditions, early 20th-century colonial Jamaica experienced a remarkable increase in life expectancy — a phenomenon referred to as the Jamaica Paradox. One factor believed to be key in this transformation was the Hookworm Campaign (1919-1936), an...

A large literature in economic history uses digitized census data to study individual-level outcomes in history. Although many census records have been digitized manually, the process is extremely labor-intensive, and substantial material remains unprocessed in archives. Recent advances in...

There is continued debate, with important social consequences, about how social status is transmitted between parents and children. In particular, how much does genetics as opposed to social causation matter? In an ingenious recent article, Collado et al. (2023), using an extended family lineage...

When women first entered Norwegian high school examinations in the late nineteenth century, did they outperform men, as they do today? Using a new dataset of 41,585 graduates from 1813 to 1929, we show that early female students initially achieved better grades than their male peers. However,...

Ever since Smith and Marx there has been a debate about the impact of industrialization on the content of work. While shifts in the occupational structure associated with industrialization are well charted, we lack systematic evidence on the tasks workers actually performed during this period of...

Recent research confirms that per capita income in early modern Spain improved only marginally overall, while also revealing sustained growth through much of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside a continued decline from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. These...