We consider the impact of non-violent religious conflict on firm-level productivity. We zoom in on a Protestant and otherwise very homogeneous country: early twentieth century Denmark. We exploit variation due to the emergence of pietist movements who fought for the hearts and minds of Danes. In...

Why did France experience the demographic transition first? This question remains one of the greatest puzzles of economics, demography, and economic history. The French pattern is hard to reconcile with elucidations of the process as found in other countries. The present analysis goes back to...

The quality of age reporting in Ireland worsened in the years after the Great Irish Famine (1845-1852), even as other measures of educational attainment improved. We show how demography partly accounts for this seemingly conflicting pattern. Specifically, we argue that a greater propensity to...

This article leverages uniquely abundant town-level data to examine spatial inequality in prices and wages during the First Globalisation. I build a new dataset on prices of traded and household goods, and wages of skilled and unskilled workers for a panel of 42 towns in Serbia, in the period...

Spain experienced economic decline from the 1570s to 1650, recovering gradually thereafter and only reaching its early 1570s per capita income in the 1820s. How did economic decline impact on people's perception of well-being and inequality? We provide an answer based on an unexplored source,...

This paper studies the impact of the Protestant Reformation on wealth distribution and inequality in confessionally divided Germany, between 1400 and 1800. The Reformation expanded social welfare, but provided it in a particularistic way to insiders only. This gave Protestantism an ambiguous...

Could we measure the contribution of women to the economy in the pre-industrial world? Yes, it is possible, particularly in the context of Russia. By analyzing archival sources, we can not only measure their contribution to the economy but also observe how the Russian Empire evolved into a more...

'Upper tail knowledge', embodied by knowledge elites, has been suggested to be a driving force of industrialization and development, yet measuring it remains problematic. Despite some recent innovations, much empirical work continues to rely on measures of 'average' or 'non-upper tail' human...

Children early in the birth order get more parental care than later children. Does this significantly affect their life chances? An extensive genealogy of 428,280 English people 1680-2024, with substantial sets of complete families, suggests that birth order had little effect on social outcomes...

This paper analyses social inequality in adult mortality over the last 500 years in rural Aragon (Spain). It uses individual-level microdata corresponding to more than 20,000 individuals whose socioeconomic status, age at death and other family, cultural and environmental variables are known....