This paper investigates the evidence for convergence in per capita incomes across 115 economies during the period 1950–1998 and examines the impact that international trade had on this process. Drawing on trade-conditioning within a distribution dynamics framework, that explicitly models...

What was the contribution of intercontinental trade to the development of the European early modern economies? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on static measures of the weight of trade in the aggregate economy at a given point in time, or on the comparison of the income of...

I analyse the age at death of 121,524 European nobles from 800 to 1800. Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violence contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect...