The purpose of the article is to present the statistical reconstruction of a series of per capita output in central–northern Italy between 1300 and 1913. The various phases of both the statistical procedure and the results are presented and discussed. From the Renaissance until the 1880s, when modern growth starts, the curve of per capita GDP is downward bent. Output series together with three robustness tests, are collected in the Appendices.

This article contributes to the debate about the early modern craft guilds’ rationale through the lens of apprenticeship. Based on a case study of the Antwerp manufacturing guilds, it argues that apprenticeship should be understood from the perspective of ‘distributional conflicts’. Fixed terms of service and masterpieces guarded the guilds’ labour market monopsony, enabling masters to distribute the available skilled and unskilled labour among members (among other ways, through the restriction of the number of apprentices per master). Although from the perspective of product quality, this may have enabled masters to prevent adverse selection, the introduction of standardized apprenticeship requirements was the result of social and rent-seeking concerns.

This article examines intergenerational wealth accumulation and transmission patterns in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu (located in north-central Anatolia), by utilizing the quantitative information as found in probate estate inventories. Specifically, it explores how sons' wealth levels were determined by a number of factors. Our results indicate that the father's wealth and the duration of wealth accumulation were positively related to the son's wealth. But the number of inheritors and, for the most part, honorary titles did not influence wealth accumulation. In addition to providing valuable insights into wealth accumulation patterns in eighteenth-century Anatolia, our findings allow us to make comparisons with Britain and comment on the process of economic development in the Middle East.

This article explores the means by which warfare influences domestic commodity markets. It is argued that England during the French Wars provides an ideal testing ground. Four categories of explanatory variables are taken as likely sources of documented changes in English commodity price disintegration during this period: weather, trade, policy and wartime events. Empirically, increases in price dispersion are related to all of the above categories. However, the primary means identified by which warfare influenced domestic commodity market integration was through international trade linkages and the arrival of news regarding wartime events.

This article explores whether the antebellum decline in heights continued in the second half of the nineteenth century by using a data set of more than 58,000 US Army recruits born between 1847 and 1894. The main finding is that heights continued to decline during the Civil War by about 0.4 in. (1.0 cm) and stagnated for an extended period of time before they began to increase among the birth cohorts of the late 1880s. Recruits from the South remained the tallest despite the Civil War, while those from the Northeast were the shortest. Height was positively correlated with proximity to protein-rich nutrients during childhood and with geographic mobility, and was negatively correlated with urbanization and infant mortality rates.

This article investigates which institutions and policies were related to the increase in European unemployment since 1970 and the productivity stagnation since the mid 1990s. By using data for 88 regions in nine European countries, national policies and institutions are analysed in a fixed-effects panel-data model to detect their relative importance after controlling for unobservable regional factors. The main finding is that institutions only started to matter after the oil crisis. The strongest institutional effects on employment came from the net reservation wages and employment protection laws. The institutional effects on productivity were mainly channelled through the employment productivity trade-off. By restricting the supply of labour, these effects were positive on productivity in the short run. However, the article shows that the long-run effects were negative and that there may be institutional roots to the European productivity slow-down in the 1990s.

In February 2008, French President Nicholas Sarkozy created a committee with a somewhat ungainly name, ‘The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, headed by Joseph Stiglitz, and advised by Amartya Sen. The aim of the Commission was to ‘identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress, including the problems with its measurement; to consider what additional information might be required for the production of more relevant indicators of social progress; to assess the feasibility of alternative measurement tools, and to discuss how to present the statistical information in an appropriate way’ (p. 7).