We use data collected by the Cambridge Group to investigate and explain differences in fertility by socio-economic group in pre-industrial England. We find, in line with results presented by Greg Clark, that wealthier groups did indeed have higher fertility until the 1700s. We demonstrate that this had to do with earlier age at marriage for women. We then turn to the likely social and economic impact of this, considering Clark's hypothesis that ‘middle-class values’ spread through English society prior to the Industrial Revolution. Through the construction of social mobility tables, we demonstrate that the children of the rich were indeed spreading through society, but they were small in number relative to poorer sections of society, and moreover the children of the poor were also entering the middle classes.

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 discusses agency problems in a period of market boom. It takes Portuguese trade with Brazil as a case study to discuss the impact of colonial market expansion on social capital. The hypothesis is that social capital depletion prompted an uneven distribution of information and a limited access to honest individuals, who might afford a premium to certain forms of agency. Given the states' inability to provide legal sanctioning in colonial regions, this article focuses on private-order mechanisms which were effective for selecting reputable individuals. The exploration of network analysis identifies the mechanism that responds to such an adverse environment and supports the argument that business organizations which counted on the geographical mobility of agents had comparative advantages. The approach followed in this article brings new insights on informal institutional arrangements and on itinerancy in contexts of low levels of social capital.

Russia's emancipation of the serfs was accompanied by numerous other measures aimed at modernizing the Tsarist economy and society. Among these ‘Great Reforms’ was the creation of a new institution of local government – the zemstvo – which has received comparatively little attention from economic historians. This quasi-democratic form of local government played an important role in expanding the provision of public goods and services in the half-century leading up to the Russian Revolution. This article utilizes archival records and contemporary evidence to outline the zemstvo's role in Russian society and describe its political structure. The article then presents a newly collected panel data set that includes information on the allocation of political rights within the zemstvo, spending and revenue decisions by district zemstva, and a variety of other socio-economic indicators. With these data, I explore whether the electoral structure of the zemstvo allowed the newly emancipated peasantry to voice their preferences over spending levels and tax rates. I find that the district zemstvo with greater political representation from the peasantry shifted taxes away from communal property and spent more per capita, especially on education. However, these effects did not derive from a direct voting mechanism but most likely arose out of the interaction between peasant representation and more liberal elements of the noble class. This study initiates a broader research agenda into the zemstvo's place in Russian economic history and contributes to the literature on the political economy of public good provision in developing societies.

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.

We analyse the Swedish general elections that took place in spring and autumn 1887. Our aim is to discover which groups of voters supported free trade and which protectionism. We find that while capital owners and wage earners consistently favoured free trade, in the spring election only the largest farmers supported protectionism. By autumn, political preferences among smallholders and middling farmers had shifted in favour of protectionism too. As these groups were not specialised in the production of import-competing goods, we assume that the political landslide in the autumn elections can be attributed to a loss of trust in the government.

We explore the association between income and international capital flows between 1880 and 1913. Capital inflows are associated with higher incomes per capita in the long run, but capital flows also brought incomes down in the short run via financial crises. Countries just barely made up for these losses over time, so that there is no conditional long-run income loss or gain for countries that experienced crises. This is in contrast to the recent wave of globalization when capital importing countries that experienced a crisis seemed to grow relatively faster over fixed periods of time. Some countries avoided crises and were able to raise incomes with foreign capital. We discuss some possibilities why.

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 addresses the question whether the substantial financial flows received by emigration countries contributed to domestic financial development in peripheral Europe before 1914. We quantify a sizable and significant relation between remittances and measures of financial development that is both larger than the contribution of other international capital flows and the best estimates of the same relation today. Given that financial development is regularly included among the conditions for economic growth and catch-up of developing nations, this article adds to our understanding of the multiple impacts of the mass migration phenomenon on the economies of emigration countries.

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 argues that market integration should be measured as σ-convergence over the largest possible sample of markets. Its focus is the European market for wheat, rye and candles from the middle of the eighteenth century to the eve of the first globalization. Price dispersion for cereals remained constant until the outbreak of the French Wars, then it increased abruptly. It began to decline after the end of the wars, and the process continued steadily until an all-time low was reached in the 1860s. Domestic and international integration contributed in roughly the same proportions to integration in the long run, but the latter was much more important in accounting for medium-term changes. These results suggest that the level of integration was determined for most of the period by war and political events, with a substantial contribution from a fall in transport costs in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By contrast, there is very little evidence of integration in the market for candles.

We consider the relative contributions of changing technology and institutions for economic growth through the investigation of a natural experiment in history: the almost simultaneous introduction of the automatic cream separator and the cooperative ownership form in the Danish dairy industry from around 1880. Using a new database of statistics from creameries and the tool of stochastic frontier analysis, we find that both institutions and technology were important for the success of the Danish dairy industry and, by implication, the growth and early development of the Danish economy.

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 provides a new perspective on the interwar foreign debt crisis by analysing original data on the credit ratings, market yields and subsequent performance of government borrowers in the New York market. We focus on the four agencies that are known to have been operating at the time (Fitch, Moody's, Poor's and Standard Statistics). We provide a description of the rise of the market for grades and gather information on the products sold, price schedules, etc. We find that rating agencies did exhibit features similar to those that have attracted considerable interest recently: namely, they did not react until the crisis had already begun and then implemented massive downgrades. We conclude by suggesting that, given the less than stellar record of the agencies, their emergence in the 1930s as a regulatory tool will have to be explained in future research.

This article presents an analysis of British urban working-class housing conditions in 1904, using a rediscovered survey. We investigate overcrowding and find major regional differences. Scottish households in the survey were more overcrowded despite being less poor. Investigating the causes of this overcrowding, we find little support for supply-side theories or for the idea that the Scottish households in our survey experienced particularly great variations in income, causing them to commit to overly modest accommodation. We present evidence that is consistent with idea that particularly tough Scottish tenancy and local tax laws caused excess overcrowding. We also provide evidence that Scottish workers had a relatively high preference for food, rather than housing, expenditure, which can be at least partly attributed to their inheritance of more communal patterns of urban living.

The objective of this article is to study how people change their behaviour when taxes change. I follow the revenue from gift, inheritance and estate taxes in Sweden over more than a century. Second, I focus on a unique episode during the second half of the 1940s when gifts and gift tax revenue exploded. I have access to aggregate tax revenue data since 1884. Moreover, I have constructed a rich micro-data set of all gifts reported during the period 1942–9 in one county. A first main result is that gifts, inheritances and estates were never important sources of tax revenue. Tax revenue as a share of GDP and total government revenue had already reached peaks in the 1930s. The role of these taxes has instead primarily been equity and to provide integrity for other tax bases. Second, expectations were important. Gift tax revenue during the 1940s started to increase long before a new estate tax and increased wealth taxation were decided and implemented. The increase began even before the legislative process started. Third, economic power and economic control were important. Parents gave to their children to avoid taxes, but only when the expected gain became large enough and in ways that left them with as much economic power as possible.

This review article looks at the recent books on the British Industrial Revolution by Robert Allen and Joel Mokyr. Both writers seek to explain Britain's primacy. This article offers a critical but sympathetic account of the main arguments of the two authors, considering both the economic logic and the empirical validity of their rival claims. In each case, the ideas are promising but the evidence base seems in need of further support. It may be that eventually these explanations for British economic leadership at the turn of the nineteenth century are recognized as complementary rather than competing.

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).