This paper argues that the conventional Malthusian account of pre-modern economies as constrained by diminishing returns resulting from a fixed land supplied is flawed because it does not recognize the importance of systematic indivisibilities in the production and distribution of farm produce...

Between 1300 and 1500 the French agricultural economy was subjected to massive demographic, political, fiscal and monetary shocks. Despite these shocks, the seigniorial system of property rights governing the ownership and use of land remained largely unchanged. This paper describes the shocks...

Recent archaeological findings indicate that the Hellenistic and Roman economy was a specialized market economy that obtained levels of factor productivity that appear to be on a par with levels current on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This raises the question when that economy began to...

Owing to the high cost of transporting farm produce before the railway age, the land-intensiveness of European mixed farming caused both production and consumption of foodstuffs and intermediate farm inputs in the steady state to be highly dispersed, a spatial configuration offering weak...

We present an overlapping generations economy populated by heterogeneous agents who care about their consumption relative to others and the bequest they leave to their offspring. In the presence of positional concerns individual saving and bequest rates vary across the income distribution. This...

A model to investigate the relationship between one variable and another usually requires controls for numerous other effects which are not constant across the sample; where the model omits some elements of the true process, estimates of parameters of interest will typically be inconsistent. Here...

This paper investigates the impact of “learning-by-producing” on inventive activity and shows that, in both emerging (electrical equipment and supplies) and maturing (shoes and textiles) industries, the geographic association between invention andproduction was rather weak during the Second...

We use the Vietnam War draft avoidance behavior documented by Card and Lemieux (2001) as a quasi-natural experiment to infer causation from education to smoking and find strong evidence that education, whether measured in years of completed schooling or in educational attainment categories,...

In view of the uncertainty over the ability of merging firms to achieve efficiency gains, we model the post-merger situation as a Cournot oligopoly wherein the outsiders face uncertainty about the merged entity’s final cost. At the Bayesian equilibrium, a bilateral merger is profitable...

When the median voter's preference sets the level of local public goods, some voters are left unsatisfied. Is there an institution by which subsets of voters can resolve the collective action problem and increase the local provision of public goods? If so, what are the consequences? In response...