Geary and Stark find that Ireland´s Post-Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was due to TFP growth rather than mass emigration. We devise new long-run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland in order to facilitate an assessment of sources...

Trends in living standards during the Industrial Revolution is a core debate in economic history. Studies using anthropometric records from institutional sources have found downward trends in living standards during the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper contributes to this...

What impact do famines have on survivors? We use individual-level data on a population exposed to severe famine conditions during infancy to document two opposing effects. The first: exposure to insufficient food and a worsened disease environment is associated with poor health into adulthood -...

The large-scale persecution of Jews during World War II generated massive refugee movements. Using data from 20,441 predominantly Jewish passengers from 19 countries traveling from Lisbon to New York between 1940 and 1942, we analyze the last wave of refugees escaping the Holocaust and verify...

Age heaping-based numeracy indicators have served as valuable tools to derive basic human capital estimates, especially for periods where other indicators are unavailable. However, the accuracy of individual age statements usually remains unknown, and due to the lack of precise information it...

Prior to the Age of Mass Migration, Germans left central Europe to settle primarily in modernday Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine and Russia. Despite the harsh conditions that the first generation of settlers had to endure, their descendants often fared better, not worse, compared to native...

This paper explores the relationship between Nazi membership and social mobility using a unique and highly detailed dataset of military conscripts and volunteers during the Third Reich. We find that membership of a Nazi organisation is positively related to social mobility when measured by the...

The 1955-56 macroeconomic crisis is a central event in modern Irish history. Yet, despite this centrality, its causes are not clearly understood. In 1955-6, Ireland, which had previously followed British interest rates in lockstep as part of its fixed exchange with the latter, briefly...

What are the insights from historical pandemics for policymaking today? We carry out a systematic review of the literature on the impact of pandemics that occurred since the Industrial Revolution and prior to Covid-19. Our literature searches were conducted between June 2020 and September 2023,...

Analysis of excess mortality holds the potential to revise understandings of key moments in modern Irish history. Yet aside from studies of the Great Famine, it has been neglected by historians of Ireland. Examining rates of excess mortality across post-Famine Ireland reveals that the Land War...