The 19th century economist Thomas Robert Malthus hypothesized that the long-run supply of labor is completely elastic at a fixed wage-income evel because population growth tends to outstrip real output growth. Dynamic equilibrium with constant income and population is achieved through...

Although Unified Growth Theory presumes the existence of the Maltusian mechanism in pre-industrial England recent empirical studies challenged this assumption. This paper studies the interaction of vital rates and real wages in the period from 1540 to 1870 in England. We employ time-varying...

Evidence from economics, anthropology and biology testifies to a fundamental trade-off between the number of offspring (quantity) and amount of nutrition per child (quality). This leads to a theory of pre-industrial growth where body size as well as population size is endogenous. But when...

Using long historical data for Britain over the period 1620-2006, this paper seeks to explain the importance of innovative activity, population growth and other factors in inducing the transition from the Malthusian trap to the post-Malthusian growth regime. Furthermore, the paper tests the...

Why does the rate of population growth decline in the face of economic growth? We show that growing product variety may induce a permanent reduction in the demand for children and a continuous rise in income and consumption

English fertility history is generally regarded as having been composed of two re-gimes: an era of unregulated marital fertility, from at least 1540 to 1890, then the modern era, with regulated marital fertility, lower for higher social classes. We show there were in fact three fertility regimes...