An extensive literature uses anthropometric measures, typically heights, to draw inferences about living standards in the past. This literature's influence reaches beyond economic history; the results of historical heights research appear as crucial components in development economics and...

This paper presents first results from a project to reconstitute the demographic behavior of three villages in Württemberg (southern Germany) from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Using high-quality registers of births, deaths, and marriages, and unusual ancillary sources, we...

The German government introduced compulsory accident insurance for industrial firms in 1884. This insurance scheme was one of the main pillars of Bismarck’s famous social insurance system. The accident-insurance system achieved only one of its intended goals: it successfully compensated...

Germany's turbulent history in the past two centuries has left its mark on her population. The industrialization of the nineteenth century promoted rapid population growth, and the spatial concentration of that industrialization provoked enormous internal migration. Germany's relatively late...

Research on "trust" now forms a prominent part of the research agenda in history and the social sciences. Although this research has generated useful insights, the idea of trust has been used so widely and loosely that it risks creating more confusion than clarity. This essay argues that to the...

Institutions that rely on joint liability to facilitate lending to the poor have a long history and are now a common feature of many developing countries. Economists have proposed several theories of joint liability lending that stress various aspects of its informational and enforcement...

The Spanish business code allowed firms great flexibility in their organizational form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Until 1920, firms had the same basic choices as in France and some other European countries, namely, the corporation, the ordinary partnership, or the...

Much of the research on height in historical populations relies on convenience samples. A crucial question with convenience samples is whether the sample accurately reflects the characteristics of the population; if not, then estimated parameters will be affected by sample selection bias. This...