This study establishes a strong association between the country-level female-to-male sex ratio at birth and the time elapsed from a society transitioned to sedentary agricultural activities (the Neolithic Revolution) until 1500AD. This association is robust to the inclusion of various...

This paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential Malthusian theory, according to which improvements in the technological environment during the pre-industrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita, eventually leading to a larger, but not significantly richer,...

This paper derives the speed of convergence to steady state in the Malthusian world, and provides some rough estimates. The basic message is that the half life of a shock in a Malthusian economy was probably quite long, on the order of two centuries. Various extensions, such as capital...

This paper presents a dynamic model of peasant exploitation by landlords in a serf or slave economy subject to Malthusian dynamics. In the baseline model the only constraint on the landlords is the fact that the peasants' labor supply is endogenous in the long run through the effect of...

More than 200 years after its first publication, the Malthusian thesis is still much debated, albeit in a modified form. Rather than predicting a global catastrophe, most neo-Malthusians stress the local character of the relationship between population pressure, natural resource scarcity, and...