We consider the impact of non-violent religious conflict on firm-level productivity. We zoom in on a Protestant and otherwise very homogeneous country: early twentieth century Denmark. We exploit variation due to the emergence of pietist movements who fought for the hearts and minds of Danes. In...

We seek to understand the welfare of dairy cattle in Denmark from 1750 to 1900, a period marked by significant agricultural development and industrialization. By applying contemporary animal welfare metrics to historical data, we uncover a detailed picture of how bovine welfare evolved. Our...

'Upper tail knowledge', embodied by knowledge elites, has been suggested to be a driving force of industrialization and development, yet measuring it remains problematic. Despite some recent innovations, much empirical work continues to rely on measures of 'average' or 'non-upper tail' human...

The relative success of the Danish and failure of the Irish dairy industries before the First World War is often contrasted given their competition for the lucrative British butter market. The traditional narrative implicitly assumes that Ireland failed because it was unsuccessful at adopting...

Economic historians have debated the importance of energy for economic development. Energy economists would argue that energy systems need to be adaptable in the face of shocks. In this light, we consider the case of Denmark, a country which was almost entirely dependent on imports of coal, and...

We consider the relative contributions of changing technology and institutions for economic growth through the investigation of a natural experiment in history: the almost simultaneous introduction of the automatic cream separator and the cooperative ownership form in the Danish dairy industry...

The late nineteenth century Danish agricultural revolution saw the modernization and growth of the dairy industry. Denmark rapidly caught up with the leading economies, and Danish dairying led the world in terms of productivity. Uniquely in a world perspective, high quality micro-level data...

Is a lack of domestic energy resources necessarily a limiting factor to growth, as suggested for example by the work of Robert C. Allen? We examine the case of Denmark - a country which historically had next to no domestic energy resources - for which we present new historical energy accounts...

The success of Danish agricultural exports at the end of the nineteenth century is often attributed to the establishment of a direct trade with Britain. Previously, exports went mostly via Hamburg, but this changed with the loss of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia in the war of 1864. After...

This paper makes use of published information on wages and prices in Denmark to construct consistent real wage series for the years 1731 to 1913, which can be compared to other countries. Placing Denmark in a comparative perspective demonstrates that from being a relatively poor, backward...