How do communication costs affect the production of new ideas and inventions? To answer this question, we study the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in Great Britain in 1840. This reform replaced the previous system of expensive distance-based postage fees with a uniform low rate of one...

How did Britain sustain faster rates of economic growth than comparable European countries, such as France, during the Industrial Revolution? We argue that Britain possessed an important but underappreciated innovation advantage: British inventors worked in technologies that were more central...

Demand for less skilled workers decreased dramatically in the US and in other developed countries over the past two decades. We argue that pervasive skill-biased technological change rather than increased trade with the developing world is the principal culprit. The pervasiveness of this...

Why was the Industrial Revolution successful at generating sustained growth? Some have argued that there was a fundamental change in the way that new technology was developed during this period, but evidence for this argument remains largely anecdotal. This paper provides direct quantitative...

This article develops a method for quantitatively tracking the agenda of the British Parliament--by which I mean the substantive topics on which Parliamentary debate was focused--from 1810-2005 using descriptions of 1.7 million Parliamentary debates from the Parliamentary Hansard. This provides...

The historical fertility transition is one of the most important events in economic history. This study provides new evidence on the role that ideas about family planning played in this transition. We begin by documenting a link between the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial that took place in...

This paper presents new evidence on international trade and worker outcomes. It examines a big world event that produced an unprecedentedly large shock to the UK exchange rate. In the 24 hours in June 2016 during which the UK electorate unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union, the value...

Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is much less evidence on their impact on firm performance. In this paper we consider a very under-studied area - the impact of minimum wages on firm...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to...