The successful assimilation of ethnic minorities into Western economies is one of the biggest challenges facing the Modern World. The substantial flows of Irish, to England, provide an historical example of this process. However, this has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. We use...

Previous research has documented the importance and persistence of social norms, but there is limited understanding of whether they are capable of changing in the short run. Utilizing data from Sweden and Denmark, this article addresses this gap by testing whether significant local shocks may...

Since the 1970s, famines have been widely invoked as natural experiments in research into the long-term impact of foetal exposure to nutritional shocks. That research has produced compelling evidence for a robust link between foetal exposure and the odds of developing schizophrenia. However, the...

World War 1 exacerbated the cost of the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 in two ways. First, it facilitated the spread the flu virus through the movement of clusters of infected soldiers and sailors. Second, it constrained public health measures that would have reduced mortality (as during the...

Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the...