Historical city directories are rich sources of micro-geographic data. They provide information on the location of households and firms and their occupations and industries, respectively. We develop a generic algorithmic work flow that converts scans of them into geo- and status-referenced...

A common problem in historical research involves harmonizing geographic units across time or different levels of aggregation. One approach is to use " crosswalks" that associate factors located within one geographic unit to different " reference" units based on relative areas . We develop an...

In this article, we analyze competition for agricultural land as an important, scarce and immobile input. The cost of cultivating a parcel of land depends strongly on the distance from the farmer to the plot, leading to spatially small land markets. To investigate this issue, we are able to use...