This paper examines how acute pollution exposure in historical London (1892–1919) affected child health. I proxy acute, extreme pollution exposure using daily data on fog events, which reflect meteorological conditions where pollution emitted in the city was not dispersed across space leading to a sharp spike in pollution. I also use rich individual-level data on child health drawn from the Queen Charlotte Hospital, a maternity hospital, and the Foundling Hospital, an orphanage. I find no effect of pollution exposure at birth on birth or growth outcomes or on upper respiratory morbidity. However, exposure on the day of birth had persistent effects on health, increasing mortality risk in childhood and adolescence from respiratory diseases and raising incidence, prevalence and sickness duration of influenza and measles. There was no persistent effect of in utero and postnatal pollution exposures. These mixed results show that extreme pollution at birth had lasting impacts on specific, but also limited, dimensions of child health.
We show how probate inventories can be used to measure the seasonal pattern of grain stocks and hence provide direct information on both intra-year and inter-year storage (“carryover”). The correct procedure to quantify total carryover is a ratio-of-means statistic that consistently estimates the appropriate weighted average of individual carryover decisions. Using an existing data base of inventories, we show that the seasonal pattern is plausible, robust to alternative specifications and consistent with an alternative way of estimating carryover. We find that average carryover in the period 1600–1750 was very low in Kent and virtually zero in Cornwall.
The gabelle salt tax system was a cornerstone of the fiscal apparatus of the early modern French state. This article introduces a novel historical geographic information system (GIS) of this institution’s spatial organization as of the seventeenth century, drawing on an original 1665 manuscript map collection: Sanson’s Atlas des gabelles. Beyond presenting the dataset and documenting its construction methodology, we provide a detailed account of the functioning of the gabelle, situate the French case in comparative perspective, and illustrate how the availability of this fine-grained dataset expands the possibilities of empirical research in economic history, historical demography, and historical political economy of early modern France.
An ongoing debate among economists concerns the extent to which increasing resource scarcity leads to more clearly defined individual property rights, when there exist significant political pressures that oppose the redistributive aspect of property right redefinition. This paper documents the role of politics in shaping the creation of individual property rights within the context of appropriative water law in early 20th century California, finding evidence of both party ideology and interest group influence in establishing a new system for administering appropriative water rights.
How did epidemic mortality affect housing wealth in the pre-industrial period? Using new data on house ownership and variation in street-level mortality in seventeenth-century Leiden, we show that although epidemic mortality targeted poor streets where residents were typically tenants and not owners, these outbreaks still increased the turnover of houses. Ordinarily, turnover was higher in owner-occupied housing sectors, while epidemics created more turnover for low-value houses consolidated in the hands of wealthy investors. In combination with a lack of house price adjustments due to rapid demographic recovery after epidemics, this meant that houses were passed between long-standing owners with similar housing wealth profiles. As a result, epidemics did not affect aggregate housing wealth inequality.
Did Germany’s industrial rise begin with its water mills? This study examines how water mills shaped early industrial development in Prussia using historical county-level census data. I show that water-powered proto-industrialization fostered skilled artisanal human capital by the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike wind or animal-powered mills, water mills supported diverse industries, driving technological spillovers and early industrialization. Counties with more water mills saw faster population growth, though this effect declined with the adoption of coal and steam. These findings underscore water power’s role in Germany’s industrial rise, suggesting that the link between water power and industrial skills was not unique to Britain but likely a broader feature of European development.
We construct estimates of quarterly GDP (and GNP) for Ireland from 1950, linking to official data from 1995 onward, using a novel factor-augmented Chow-Lin interpolation. Compared to the only alternative series (OECD, 2025), our estimates exploit the variation in a large number of official quarterly economic data and are broadly consistent with contemporary reports. Our series permits a more granular identification of turning points in the Irish economy than was previously possible. The frequency and magnitude of quarterly contractions in the 1950s and 1980s dwarfed those of other decades resulting in lower average growth rates. In contrast, the 1990s are confirmed as a decisive period of higher growth and rapid convergence.
I construct the first annual-frequency dataset of agricultural output for China's Yangzi Delta covering the period 1393-1953. Over six centuries, agriculture in the region expanded in total output but exhibited little per capita growth and no significant productivity improvement after the fifteenth century. Using the new data, I estimate representative rural household income and per capita GDP. The results indicate that by the late seventeenth century, both measures in the Yangzi Delta had fallen behind those of leading Western economies, including Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy. The timing of the Great Divergence thus lies between the estimates proposed by traditional Eurocentric scholars and those of the California School.
We present new annual time-series data on academic human capital across Europe from 1200 to 1793, constructed by aggregating individual-level measures at three geographic scales: cities, present-day countries (as of 2025), and historically informed macro-regions. Individual human capital is derived from a composite index of publication outcomes, based on data from the Repertorium Eruditorum Totius Europae (RETE) database. The macro-regional classifications are designed to reflect historically coherent entities, offering a more relevant perspective than modern national boundaries. This framework allows us to document key patterns, including the Little Divergence in academic human capital between Northern and Southern Europe, the effect of the Black Death and the Thirty Years’ War on academic human capital, the respective contributions of academies and universities, regional inequality across Catholic and Protestant areas of the Holy Roman Empire, and the distinctiveness of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Market integration is vital for economic development; its determinants have been extensively documented in the literature. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of economic organizations. This paper seeks to fill this gap by investigating the role of futures exchanges in Republican China. Using manually collected primary data, we employ a continuous difference-in-differences approach to analyze the impact of the Chinese Cotton Goods Exchange on long-distance market integration. We find that, following the exchange's establishment in 1921, geographically distant cities experienced a stronger increase in market integration with Shanghai than nearby cities. Regarding the underlying mechanism, we show that the price-discovery function of the futures exchange promoted long-distance market integration by centralizing markets and reducing price uncertainty.
This paper examines the impact of droughts and hurricanes on key agricultural exports in the British Caribbean between 1850 and 1960, and investigates how diversification shaped economic outcomes. Using export data gathered from Colonial Blue Books, along with proxies for drought and hurricane exposure, the analysis shows that extreme climate events affected crops unevenly: while cocoa, cotton, coffee, coconuts and bananas experienced major declines, sugar proved relatively resilient. Counterfactual estimations reveal that diversification often worsened revenue losses during extreme events, especially in colonies that shifted away from sugar towards less climate-resilient crops. These findings challenge the widely held assumption that diversification inherently reduces risk, showing that it may, in certain contexts, increase economic vulnerability to climate shocks.
We examine regional variation in Chinese GDP per head for five benchmark years from the Song dynasty to the Qing. For the Ming and Qing dynasties, we provide a breakdown of regional GDP per head across seven macro regions, establishing that East Central China was the richest macro region. In addition, we provide data on the Yangzi Delta, the core of East Central China, widely seen as the richest part of China since 1400. Yangzi Delta GDP per head was 64 to 67 per cent higher than in China as a whole for three of the four Ming and Qing benchmarks, and 52 per cent higher during the late Ming. For the Northern Song dynasty, although it is not possible to derive a full regional breakdown, we provide data for Kaifeng Fu, the region containing the capital city as well as the Yangzi Delta. GDP per head in Kaifeng Fu was more than twice the level of China as a whole and higher than in the Yangzi Delta. Combined with aggregate data for GDP per head, these estimates suggest that China was the leading economy in the world during the Song dynasty and that the Great Divergence began around 1700 as the leading region of China fell decisively behind the leading region of Europe. They are also consistent with a shift in the economic centre of gravity from the north to the south between the Northern Song and Ming dynasties.
The location of work is a topic of renewed scholarly and public interest, particularly spurred by the recent increase in working from home. Research in several social sciences demonstrates that work locations and workspaces have a significant impact on workers’ lives. Historians concur that in the long term, spatial changes in work have profound effects. It is therefore curious that beyond a limited set of examples, worksites and workspaces have received minimal sustained attention from economic historians. Here we survey the existing research and suggest ways forward. We begin by proposing a set of terms to distinguish between worksites, which are the geographical places of work, and workspaces, the immediate physical surroundings in which work occurs. We then survey recent research on changing worksites, the impacts of travel-to-work patterns on quality of life, and the effects of workspace arrangements. These literatures emphasize the multi-faceted consequences of location and space. Turning to historical research, we highlight three workplace-related topics that have attracted significant interest from historians: the history of commuting; the transition from home-based work to factories; and the locations of women’s work. These strands of research imply a U-shaped curve of working from home over time, but we note that quantitative investigations to support these observations are generally lacking. Inspired by current explorations of workplace change, we suggest new directions for historical research and conclude that there is a rich landscape of work-related research awaiting rigorous historical investigation.
Travel improved dramatically between 1660 and 1820 in England and Wales. This paper uses nearly 100 travellers’ diaries to study the mode choice, speed of road transport and the quality of the roads used from the mid-1600s to 1820. Using mapping software, we digitise journeys made by various travel modes along more than 348,000 journey miles. We document that travel shifted from the saddlehorse to wheeled vehicles and that speed increased, although to a lesser degree in private or hired carriages compared to stagecoaches. We also report a novel measure of road quality using diarists’ descriptions of the road. The reported quality of many main roads went from ‘poor’ to ‘adequate’ or ‘good’ by the early 19th century. We also show that turnpike trusts, a novel organization for road funding, contributed to significantly better quality and were favoured over other roads by travellers in wheeled vehicles. Our estimates imply that the spread of turnpike trusts can account for most of the road quality change from 1660 to 1820.
Numerous Italian farms were established in colonial Libya during the 1920s and 30s, but Italian settlers were expelled in two steps: from Cyrenaica (East) in 1942, and from Tripolitania (West) in 1970. I study the consequences of these expulsions and, through their lenses, of the presence of Italian skilled farmers on the agricultural sector of 20th century Libya. Leveraging newly assembled district-level data on agricultural production, I estimate two separate triple differences that combine unaffected Italian districts and Libyan ones to build a credible counterfactual. The removal of Italian farmers led, in both cases, to a relative reduction in the level of commercialization and a return to the production of traditional field crops. The abandonment of particular farming practices, such as irrigated commercial crops, explains this pattern.
In this paper, we analyze the direct economic functions of White-on-Black violence in the Jim Crow South. As we will see, White-on-Black violence was used to control Black labor and to seize gains made by Black agriculturalists. We find that White-on-Black lynchings during the pre-harvest period were used by White landlords to increase the total amount of man-hours expended by Black sharecroppers. We also find that the occurrence of one or more White-on-Black lynchings in a given county is associated with a 1.9 percent decrease in Black landownership in the same county in each of the three years following said lynching, and we find that the 1912 Forsyth Massacre and the 1906 Atlanta Massacre had even larger effects. Given the high frequency of White-on-Black violence in the Jim Crow South, the impact on Black labor and the cumulative effect on Black landownership and town and city property were huge.
Between about 1850 and 1920, Western Europe underwent a period of democratization and liberalization, resulting in the expansion of government and the establishment of universal suffrage. This paper examines the impact of politicians’ personal wealth on this process, with a focus on the case of The Netherlands, using data from newly-collected probate inventories as a measure of politicians’ wealth. The paper finds that the wealth of parliaments decreased significantly over time, and that richer politicians were more likely to vote against fiscal legislation, suggesting that personal wealth negatively influenced the probability of increasing taxes and played a role in determining government size. The analyses presented in the paper support a causal interpretation of these results. However, the study finds no significant relationship between politicians’ personal wealth and their voting behavior on suffrage extensions.
This paper evaluates the usefulness of crowd-sourced Chinese genealogical data for quantitative research in demography and economic history. I first examine whether genealogies — despite well-known selection biases — produce demographic patterns consistent with established historical knowledge of China. Comparisons with existing studies show that aggregate population-growth trends and sex ratios over time align reasonably well with established demographic and historical findings, suggesting that genealogies, though selective, capture coherent and interpretable patterns. Building on these plausibility checks, the paper argues that the main value of genealogical data lies in their scalability and temporal depth, particularly as crowd-sourced digitization vastly expands the number of available records. These features make genealogies well suited to analyses that leverage variation across regions and over time, an approach that is central in modern economic history.
Using a unique dataset of 3,022 elites from the Ly to Nguyen dynasties (1075-1919) and 1,324 recent associate (and full) professors (2021-2023), we find that regions with more historical elites have more modern professors. Using the distance to the school exam venue and the distance to the coastal areas as instrumental variables, we establish such a causal relationship. In addition, social capital benefits those from areas dense with historical elites. We analyze data from temples, schools, and streets named after elites to identify cultural mechanisms linking historical elites to contemporary academic roles in Vietnam. This study demonstrates the lasting impact of historical traditions on human capital today in Confucian contexts.
We investigate the well-being of urban workers in Angola under colonialism. Using a newly compiled dataset derived from archival and secondary sources, we construct welfare ratios for both skilled and unskilled workers in the cities of Luanda and Benguela from 1760 to 1975. Our findings indicate that Angolan workers experienced lower economic prosperity compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world. Living standards declined during the 19th century, followed by a recovery emerging in the 20th century - particularly from the mid-1960s.
