Market size is claimed by various economic traditions to be an important factor in explaining the transition to modern economic growth.  This paper examines whether differences in market size might explain the retardation of the Industrial Revolution in France.  It uses an exceptional source...

This paper explains the observed stagnation of `happiness` measures in the post-war period through a growth model in which agents care about conspicuous consumption. There are two goods: a `normal good` and a `status good`. Normal goods confer direct utility, while status goods confer utility...

Unrestricted reduced form vector autoregressive (VAR) models have become a dominant research strategy in empirical macroeconomics since Sims (1980) critique of traditional macroeconometric modeling. They are however subjected to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper we propose...

Despite some disagreements about specific timing, it is now widely accepted that France was the first European country to experience a systematic decline in fertility, a decline that took place in a very distinctive geographical pattern.  Whereas two areas of low birth rates (the Seine valley...

This paper makes a contribution to the study of economic growth in developing countries by analysing the six largest Latin American Economies over 105 years within a two-equation framework. Confirming previous findings, physical and human capital prove to be key determinants of GDP per capita...

A well-known time-inconsistency problem hinders optimal decision-making when policymakers are constrained in their pesent choices by expectations of future outcomes.  The time-inconsistency problem is caused by differences in the preferences of policymakers who exist at different points in...

The Malthusian "preventive check" mechanism has been well documented for pre-industrial England through evidence for a negative correlation between the marriage rate and the price of wheat.  Other literature, however, speculates that the correlation was in fact positive from the early...

There is a wide literature on the dynamic adjustment of employment and its relationship with the business cycle. Our aim is to propose a statistical model that offers a congruent representation of post-war UK labour market. We use a cointegrated vector autoregressive Markov-switching model where...

We introduce a reduced rank technique for testing for common deterministic shifts. The reduced rank approach is analysed also in the context of super exogenity and an alternative test for super-exogenity is proposed. One important advantage of this approach is that departing from the...