Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the...

This paper models corruption as optimal parasitism in organizations where teams of agents are weakly restrained by principals. Each agent takes on part of the role of principal, choosing how much to invest in policing to repress corruption in others and how rapaciously to act when unpoliced...

Abstract We investigate by how much the Little Ice Age reduced the harvests on which pre-industrial Europeans relied for survival. We find that weather strongly affected crop yields, but can find little evidence that western Europe experienced long swings or structural breaks in climate....

Abstract While Irish GNP quadrupled between 1990 and 2007, this Celtic Tiger growth came from two distinctive, sequential booms, with export driven growth during the 1990s being followed after 2000 by a credit fuelled construction boom. Bank lending rose from 60 per cent of GNP in 1997 to 200...

Mass emigration was one key feature of the Great Irish Famine which distinguishes it from today’s famines. By bringing famine victims to overseas food supplies, it undoubtedly saved many lives. Poverty traps prevented those most in need from availing of this form of relief, however....

Analysis of marital fertility in rural Derry c. 1911 confirms the presence even then of a gap between Catholics and Protestants. The difference was small, however, compared to today's, and for couples who had married before the mid-1880's it was insignificant. Various indicators of 'wealth'...

Much of the controversy about labour migration concerns an aspect which is not easily measured, the 'quality' of the flow. The first part of the paper applies logit analysis to a sample of emigrants from an Irish border county for some insight on the issue. The results suggest that while those...

The paper describes the insights which trade theory can provide into economic developments in Ireland during the 1930s. First, a version of Ronald Jones's "specific factors" model is applied to the period after 1932, when a policy which combined industrial tariff protection and controls on...

The contrasting tariff regimes of Northern and Southern Ireland after 1932 must have influenced industrial structure and specialization. Can a comparison of Northern and Southern data from the 1960s, just before the South began to opt for trade liberalization again, 'reveal' the damage done by...

An important drawback of single equation migration models is that in effect they assume wages and employment to be independent of the level of migration. Williamson has proposed instead a simple general equilibrium model with labour supply and demand equations for sending and receiving countries...