The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half ofthe nineteenth century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profitrate doubled and the...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to 1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit rate doubled and the...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy during the industrial revolution and shows that they contain a story of dramatically increasing inequality between 1800 and 1840: GDP per worker rose 37%, real wages stagnated, and the profit rate doubled. The share of...

This paper develops a simple dynamic model to examine the breakout from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It identifies several factors that determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without engendering declining living standards; this is termed maximum...

This paper develops a simple dynamic model to examine the breakout from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It identifies several factors that determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without engendering declining living standards; this is termed maximum...

This paper develops a simple dynamic model to examine the breakout from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It identifies several factors that determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without engendering declining living standards; this is termed maximum...

This paper presents new estimates of total factor productivity growth in Britain for the period 1770-1860. We use a dual technique recently popularized by Hsieh (1999), and argue that the estimates we derive from factor prices are of similar quality to quantity-based calculations. Our results...

Why did England industrialize first? And why was Europe ahead of the rest of the world? Unified growth theory in the tradition of Galor-Weil (2000) and Galor-Moav (2002) captures the key features of the transition from stagnation to growth over time. Yet we know remarkably little about why...

The extent to which fixed factors of production such as land constrain per-capita income growth has been a widely discussed topic in economics since at least Malthus (1798). Whether fixed factors limit growth depends crucially on two variables: the substitutability of fixed factors in...

This paper constructs a two-country stochastic growth model in which neutraland investment-specic technology shocks are nonstationary but cointegrated acrosseconomies. It uses this model to interpret data showing that while real investmenthas grown faster than real consumption in the United...