Leaving home and entering service was a key transition in early modern England. This paper presents evidence on the age of apprenticeship in London. Using a new sample of 22,156 apprentices bound between 1575 and 1810, we find that apprentices became younger (from 17.4 to 14.7 years) and more...

When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...

This paper examines the effect of a new technology on a labour-intensive service. Comparing primal and dual TFP-growth with final-year social savings, we find that, between 1900 and 1938, motion pictures increased entertainment output (measured in spectator-hours) by at least nine percent...

At the start of the long wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the taxes available to the British state fell mainly on outlays made by its citizens, upon domestically produced commodities and services. Smaller proportions came from import duties and direct taxes upon their incomes...

This paper estimates and compares the benefits cinema technology generated to society in Britain, France and the US between 1900 and 1938. It is shown how cinema industrialised live entertainment, by standardisation, automation and making it tradable. The economic impact is measured in three...

This paper re-examines the economics of premodernapprenticeship in England. I present new data showing that ahigh proportion of apprenticeships in seventeenth centuryLondon ended before the term of service was finished. I thenpropose a new account of how training costs and repaymentswere...

During the same period in which political decisions became increasingly indistinguishable from decisions about science and technology, science and technology became increasingly incomprehensible to all but a few specialists. Maintaining a healthy participatory democracy under such conditions...

Based on outcomes for residents and qualitative studies, it is widelythought that public services meet the needs of residents less well indeprived areas, and that this is due to both the demands placed onservices being greater and the services themselves being of a lowerquality. This paper looks...

This paper takes as its starting point Henry Neuburger’s injunction that taxationmust be seen as a contribution to the maintenance of the welfare state, not as adead-weight burden. It sets recent developments in the UK tax ratio in thecontext of changes in public spending, particularly on...

The way we run urban neighbourhoods in Britain is a key to reversingsocial exclusion, crime and poor performance on almost every front inour cities. This study for the Social Exclusion Unit of seven models ofneighbourhood management analyses the reason for its key position inthe national...