Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe produced drastically different responses.  In Germany, a liberal variant known as Reform developed, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe.  We develop a model of religious organization which explains this polarization.  In...

This paper presents a wage series for unskilled English women workers from 1260 to 1850 and compares it with existing evidence for men.  Our series cast light on long run trends in women's agency and wellbeing, revealing an intractable, indeed widening gap between women and men's remuneration...

We show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain than predicted by a standard gravity model.  This trade surplus declines linearly and monotonically over time.  We argue that these...

This study provides statistical evidence that Russian rural/urban wages diverged substantially during the industrialization of Russia in the late nineteenth century. However, over time both the variation declined and integration somewhat increased as rural labour responded to new opportunities....

Despite some disagreements about specific timing, it is now widely accepted that France was the first European country to experience a systematic decline in fertility, a decline that took place in a very distinctive geographical pattern.  Whereas two areas of low birth rates (the Seine valley...

The paper compares Feinstein`s and Clark`s consumer price and real wage indices for the British industrial revolution. The sources for their weights and component price series are evaluated. While some of Clark`s innovations are improvements, many of his changes degrade the price index. A new...

This paper surveys the causes and consequences of late 19th century globalization, as well as the anti-globalization backlash of that period.

Recent literature surveys indicate the absence of definitive evidence distinguishing unitary from collective models of the household. In this paper, we exploit dramatic changes in divorce law legislation in Canada to test one variant of the collective approach, cooperative Nash bargained...