What is the effect of state capacity on economic development? I argue that strong and centralised states are capable of mobilising the resources required to establish an efficient administration and provide public goods, which are preconditions for modern economic growth. To test this...

This survey sheds light on the causes and consequences of the global sanitary revolution that resulted in the spread of waterworks and sewerage projects since the middle of the 19th century, by drawing on research from the fields of economic history, economics and history. I begin with a...

This paper studies the impact of the Protestant Reformation on wealth distribution and inequality in confessionally divided Germany, between 1400 and 1800. The Reformation expanded social welfare, but provided it in a particularistic way to insiders only. This gave Protestantism an ambiguous...

Broadberry, Guan and Li (2018) made estimates for China's GDP per capita from 980 to 1840 in order to date the onset of the Great Divergence between China and western European economies. In response to Solar's (2021) criticisms, they (2021) made some revisions to the estimates but largely...

Between 1890 and 1913, Russian Empire experienced a rapid transition to an industrial economy, catching up with Western countries. Using accidental elements in German settlement locations in Russia 1763-1861, the paper estimates the effects of the more educated Germans in Russia’s industrial...

Earlier research on poverty failed to provide us with consistent measures of its prevalence across space and time. This is due to the limitations of the available sources and to the difficulty of applying to them the poverty definitions of modern social science. This article discusses different...

This paper explores the relationship between market access and education levels in the context of an industrializing economy, in this case Spain between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, we examine whether differences in regional accumulations of human capital...

The European Marriage Pattern (EMP), in place in NW Europe for perhaps 500 years, substantially limited fertility. But how could such limitation persist when some individuals who deviated from the EMP norm had more children? If their children inherited their deviant behaviors, their descendants...