From an extensive dataset of wheat yields at municipal level in mid eighteenth-century Spain, a detailed statistical analysis indicates that the differences in wheat yields were mainly a consequence of different natural conditions, and that demand did not have a significant influence....

Did the late industrialization in Europe’s periphery improve life for its urban class? This paper examines family living conditions in northern Spain during late industrialization in the interwar period. We concentrate on the Basque region, one of the emerging industrial areas from the 1870s...

This paper analyses rural conflict in one of the most volatile areas of interwar Europe, the latifundia regions of the South of Spain. The historical and economics literature argues that rural conflict was a bottom-up, spontaneous response of landless peasants to unemployment, bad harvests, land...

This paper looks at the causes of rural conflict in 1930s Spain. Rather than stressing bottom-up forces of mobilisation linked to poor harvests and rural unemployment or the inability of the state to enforce reformist legislation, this paper explores the role of state policy in sorting out the...

This paper estimates the yields for five grains in 33 provinces of Spain in the mid-18th century. The results show that yields were higher in the north of the country, and that the most fertile provinces of Spain were not far behind the most advanced agricultural regions of the world. Average...

The Spanish 2nd Republic (1931-1936) witnessed one of the fastest and deepest processes of popular mobilization in interwar Europe, generating a decisive reactionary wave that brought the country to the Civil War (1936-1939). We show in the paper that both contemporary comment and part of the...

We investigate human capital accumulation in Spain using alternative approaches based on the concept of ‘labor quality’ and on the idea of education. We, then, assess the effect of human capital accumulation on labor productivity growth and discuss the implications of the different measures...

We survey aggregate growth in a sample of 27 European countries during the interwar period. We discuss the available data, possible explanations for a slowdown in growth rates and test the explanatory power of several hypotheses put forward in the literature.