Recent research has shown early economies to exhibit market behavior by using institutions that reduce price volatility. In this paper we focus on storage as a price stabilizing strategy in Babylon using a recent dataset with agricultural prices for the Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods...

At least some ancient civilizations used various risk-management strategies to minimize price volatility. In this article, we examine one such strategy, grain storage, by means of a dataset recently made available that provides agricultural prices for Babylonia during the Late Achaemenid and...

In recent years interest in welfare levels in ancient economies has increased considerably partly as a result of a quest to find the start of modern economic growth. These welfare levels can be calculated in two ways. First, it can be done using GDP per capita, capturing average income in a...

There is a general consensus that human capital is a major determinant of economic development. However, the range of available human capital variables is very wide in both a technical and a theoretical sense, so that different human capital measures are sometimes only loosely correlated. This...

In this paper, we revisit the relationship between educational and income inequalities in a historical perspective, using a newly developed annual dataset of average years of education in Europe. Theoretically one would expect a reduction in educational inequality should, given the positive...

Central and Eastern Europe is a region with widely divergent development paths. Until World War II, these countries experienced comparable growth patterns. Whereas Austria and West Germany remained part of the capitalist West and underwent periods of rapid growth, other countries, under state...

In this paper we extend our previous studies (Didenko et al., 2012; Földvári et al., 2012; Van Leeuwen et al., 2011) on the role of conventional factors of production (fixed, or physical, and human forms of capital) and their productivity depending on their interrelations and economic development...

The average years of education, an indicator of the average educational attainment in a population, is a widely used proxy of human capital stock in the empirical literature. Its application is somewhat limited by data availability, even though annual series have already been created for a few...