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....

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...

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 uses the adoption and invention of the spinning jenny as a test case to understand why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century rather than in France or India.  It is shown that wages were much higher relative to capital prices in Britain than in other...

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower. While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertake original research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, the follower must undertake...

Jones (1971) examines a three-factor two-good model under the assumption that two of the factors are specific to one sector (a different sector for each such factor). In this paper that specification is weakened, so that only one sector (agriculture) has a specific factor (land). When land is a...

Conventional wisdom has that peripheral economies had to `play by the rules of the game` under the Classical Gold Standard (1870s-1914), while core countries could get away with frequent violations. Drawing on the experience of three core economies (England, France, Germany) and seven peripheral...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to 1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit rate doubled and the...

This paper attempts to establish the trend of market development in Europe in the centuries before the industrial revolution, by applying three different measures of market integration to a compilation of monthly and annual price data. In contrast to much of the existing work, which suggests...