I exploit the sudden increase in employment in 1975, 1976 and 1977 in some former homelands by comparing the long term adult physical outcomes of children benefitting from the employment increase to those not subject to it. Using a standard difference in difference approach I find that there was...

Macro-economic measurement goes back to the 17th century and became common practice in Western countries since the late-19th century. Since then, the growth and composition of some of the largest economies in Asia, particularly India and Japan, was also probed. And since the 1940s government...

The dramatic expansion of public and private financial markets in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution has received extensive attention. Despite interest in the operation of the capital market, much less is known about how ordinary individual investors managed risk within this framework....

This paper reports the first long-run test of how Genuine Savings (also called comprehensive investment or adjusted net savings) predicts future well-being. The theory of weak sustainability suggests that a country with a positive level of Genuine Savings (GS) should experience non-declining...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

This paper undertakes an investigation of the process of decline and rebirth of textile manufacturing in two Middle Eastern regions, Egypt and western Anatolia during the first wave of globalisation (1850-1914). Through the application of the “Dutch Disease” model we explore the linkages...

A country's most important asset is its people. This paper outlines the development of Britain's human resources since the middle of the 19th century. It focuses on four key elements. The first is the demographic transition - the processes through which birth rates and death rates fell, leading...

In this paper, we assess the inheritance of human capital in the early modern period with a comprehensive dataset covering eight countries in Europe and Latin America. We focus on the within-household process of human capital formation. Gregory Clark suggested that the wealthy and...