According to various growth theories, technology is the main factor driving long-run growth and economic convergence. Yet this process is constrained by the features of a country's institutional background. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between economic convergence and...

In Modernization Theory, it is argued that both the socio-economic background and education level of labourers affect the job market. In this article, we analyse the effects of both factors on the job market of Piedmont, a region in the north-west of Italy, using a new dataset of job-offer...

In Modernization Theory, it is argued that both the socio-economic background and education level of labourers affect the job market. In this article, we analyse the effects of both factors on the job market of Piedmont, a region in the north-west of Italy, using a new dataset of job-offer...

This paper pulls together many primary and secondary sources to arrive at consistent estimates of national income for china between the 17th and 20th centuries. We find, in line with much of the literature, that GDP per capita declined between the mid-17th and 19th centuries. This trend reversed...

We use numbers of Covid-related tweets over Dutch regions in month 1-9 of 2020. Peaks in tweets precede the peaks of infections by about one month (the exception is June when the corona emergency law (“Spoedwet”) was introduced, which drew a lot of online comments. The reason for this time...

In this paper, we trace the causes of regional industrial development in the nineteenth century Low Countries by disentangling the complex relationship between industrialisation, technological progress and human capital formation. We use sectoral differences in the application of technology and...

This paper presents new estimates of the development of the urban population andthe urbanization ratio for the period spanning the Song and late Qing dynasties. Urbanizationis viewed, as in much of the economic historical literature on the topic, as an indirectindicator of economic development...

In recent decades, national income has become increasingly important as a measure of a nation’s economic health. In this study, we used a wide array of primary and secondary sources to arrive at values of the Chinese per capita gross domestic product (GDP) during the period of 1661–1933. We...

Recently, more and more use is made from book production as a measure of the long-run development of human capital. However, its relation with technology and growth is often found to be small and changing over time. In this paper we try to establish the link between book production and the...

Many studies indicate that human height is determined largely by childhood circumstances, which in turn influences an adult's labor market opportunities. The aim of this note is to test this thesis by examining the correlation between childhood circumstances and labor market outcomes on the one...