This paper uses a panel of 21,618 people with rare surnames whose wealth is observed at death in England and Wales 1858-2012 to measure the intergeneration elasticity of wealth over five generations. We show, using rare surnames to track families, that wealth is much more persistent over...

This paper examines Gibrat’s law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat’s law broadly holds even in the face of population doubling every fifty years, an industrial and transport revolution, and...

This paper studies demand for commercial medical assistance in early modern England. We measure individual consumption of medical and nursing services using a new dataset of debts at death between c.1670-c.1790. Levels of consumption of medical services were high and stable in London from the...

In early modern Venice, a wide range of people offered care, goods and services for the health of the city’s numerous inhabitants. This study utilises Venice’s civic death registers to assess when and why the sick and dying accessed medical care, and how this changed over the course of the...

This article mobilizes and integrates both existing and new time series data on real wages, physical heights and age-heaping to examine the long-term trend of living standards and human capital for China during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Our findings confirm the existence of a...

This paper presents a brief review of the literature on the probable economic effects of population ageing in the industrial economies over the next 4 decades. Outline information is provided about short-run and long-run changes in the size and age structure of the population. The implications...

The paper sets out estimates for various aspects of well-being during British industrialisation. Judgements about changes in living standards are shown to be sensitive to weighting procedures. It is argued that recent participants in the famous standards of living controversy have assigned undue...

In 1866, the Midland Railway Company demolished Agar Town, an area Victorian writers called the foulest slum in London, to make way for the development of St Pancras railway station. Most Londoners lauded the action. But what kind of tenants actually inhabited the area before it was destroyed,...