The traditional education system in Qing China has been widely debated over the past decades. Some have argued it was efficient and furthered economic growth, while others have stressed its inefficient nature, which led to the introduction of the modern education system in the closing decades of...

In this paper, we address the issue of how education affected income inequality in twentieth-century Africa. Three channels are identified through which education may affect income inequality. First, an increase in the average educational level is correlated with an increase in average income,...

In recent decades there has been increasing attention for Chinese economic development. There has been a big debate though if its growth is caused by capital accumulation (perspiration factors) or driven by Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth (inspiration factors). The difference between both...

In this paper, we trace the causes of regional industrial development in the nineteenth century Low Countries by disentangling the complex relationship between industrialisation, technological progress and human capital formation. We use sectoral differences in the application of technology and...

We use numbers of Covid-related tweets over Dutch regions in month 1-9 of 2020. Peaks in tweets precede the peaks of infections by about one month (the exception is June when the corona emergency law (“Spoedwet”) was introduced, which drew a lot of online comments. The reason for this time...

In Modernization Theory, it is argued that both the socio-economic background and education level of labourers affect the job market. In this article, we analyse the effects of both factors on the job market of Piedmont, a region in the north-west of Italy, using a new dataset of job-offer...

There is a general consensus that human capital is a major factor behind long-run economic growth. Yet, on a macro level, the empirical results do not always seem to concur with this view. To explain this gap between theory and empirics, more focus has been laid on measurement error and data...

In recent decades, national income has become increasingly important as a measure of a nation’s economic health. In this study, we used a wide array of primary and secondary sources to arrive at values of the Chinese per capita gross domestic product (GDP) during the period of 1661–1933. We...

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...