We apply insights from the political economy of secession to analyse the early years of the Irish Free State (IFS). The IFS was fortuitous in a debt settlement that enabled it to begin its existence debt free, whilst also receiving financial assistance to quell civil unrest. Yet the IFS was...

Trends in living standards during the Industrial Revolution is a core debate in economic history. Studies using anthropometric records from institutional sources have found downward trends in living standards during the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper contributes to this...

What impact do famines have on survivors? We use individual-level data on a population exposed to severe famine conditions during infancy to document two opposing effects. The first: exposure to insufficient food and a worsened disease environment is associated with poor health into adulthood -...

We apply insights from the political economy of secession to analyse the early years of the Irish Free State (IFS). The IFS was fortuitous in a debt settlement that enabled it to begin its existence debt free, whilst also receiving financial assistance to quell civil unrest. Yet the IFS was...

For many years, the World Bank has reported estimates of the degree of sustainability of the world’s economies using a measure of adjusted net savings. We construct long-run sustainability indicators for Germany over the period 1850-2000 to test the relationship between these net savings-based...

Genuine Savings has emerged as a widely-used indicator of sustainable development. In this paper, we use long-term data stretching back to 1870 to undertake empirical tests of the relationship between Genuine Savings (GS) and future well-being for three countries: Britain, the USA and Germany....

Genuine Savings has emerged as a widely-used indicator of sustainable development. In this paper, we use long-term data stretching back to 1870 to undertake empirical tests of the relationship between Genuine Savings (GS) and future well-being for three countries: Britain, the USA and Germany....