The paper provides a historical overview of the institutional development of the structural elements of the standard employment contract in Germany from the beginning of World War I until the outbreak of World War II. For this purpose, a model of the standard employment contract including...

The paper studies wage and employment determination in the Swedish business sector from the mid-1910s to the late 1930s. This period includes the boom and bust cycle of the early 1920s as well as the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The events of the early 1920s are particularly intriguing,...

We analyze the extent and effects of job-related persecution under communist regimes in the Czech Republic and Poland using a representative sample of individuals aged 50+ from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Retrospective information collected in the SHARELIFE interview...

The demographic history of the Jews in the Middle Ages may be characterized by two main phenomena: i) a sharp drop in the number of Jews until the beginning of the modern period, due mainly to conversions; and, ii) early urbanization. Until now, these features have been analyzed as primarily...

The U.S. tuberculosis movement pioneered many of the strategies of modern public health campaigns. Dedicated to eradicating a specific disease, it was spearheaded by voluntary associations and supported by the sale of Christmas seals. Although remarkable in its scope and intensity, the...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. What was its impact on the structure of employment? We use U.S. Census data from 1910 to 1940 and measure electrification with the length of higher-voltage electricity lines. Instrumenting for...

Industrialization and the rise of nationalism were the two major developments in Germany before the World War I. A novel county-level dataset reveals that industrialization and nationalism measured by membership in the "Kriegervereine'", the biggest civil organization at the time, were...

History is a key subject in most educational system in Western countries, and there is ongoing concern about the the degree of historical knowledge and historical sensibility that students obtain after their high school graduation. This paper proposes a simple linetime test for quantitatively...

We investigate women's fertility, labor and marriage market responses to large declines in child and maternal mortality that occurred following a major medical innovation in the US. In response to the decline in child mortality, women delayed childbearing and had fewer children overall. Fewer...