The theory of interventionism argues that government interventions are inherently destabilizing, which in turn helps explain the growth of government. I argue that the theory of interventionism is also useful for explaining the process of economic growth. At first, an intervention reduces living...

This paper aims to explain differences in infant mortality across the colony of Quebec, known in the 1850s as Canada East, by institutional settings. Areas settled under French laws (known as seigneurial law) implied important transfers from peasants to landlords through private taxes and...

This paper uses the price and wage data contained in the 1831 census of Lower Canada to provide regional estimates of disparities in living standards within Quebec in 1831. Combining these data with price data for the colony as a whole, we compare living standards in Quebec with those of...

We argue that the system of seigneurial tenure used in the province of Quebec until the mid-nineteenth centurya system which allowed significant market power in the establishment of plants, factories and mills, combined with restrictions on the mobility of the labor force within each seigneurial...

In this paper, we consider whether or not inequality forces society to expend more resources on supervision which imposes an extra cost to doing business. Some argue that since inequality deteriorates social capital, there is a greater need for supervisory labor which is a costly burden to bear....

We test the history-augmented Solow model with respect to its predictions on the patterns of divergence and convergence between the nowadays industrialized countries of the OECD. We show that the dispersion of incomes increased after the Industrial Revolution, peaked during the Second World War,...

Previous work has demonstrated the potential for wheat market integration between the US and the UK before the 'first era of globalization' in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was however frequently interrupted by policy and 'exogenous' events such as war. This paper adds Canada to...

In this paper we study Malthusian pressures in a frontier economy. Using the empirical data on the real prices and demographic variables from 1688 to 1860 for Quebec and Montreal, we test for the existence of Malthusian pressures. Bearing in mind the particularities of frontier economies and the...

We assess the effects of changes in household size on the long-run evolution of living standards and on cross-country convergence. When the observed changes in average household size across countries are taken into consideration, growth in living standards is slower throughout the 20th century...