This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data...

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...

What was the impact of urban political structure on economic inequality in preindustrial times? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher economic inequality in a panel of early modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that...

Most creatives acquire professional talents by learning from others, but in most settings it is difficult to estimate the existence of long-term effects. This paper explores the transmission of skills over a period of more than seven centuries by focusing on the case of music composers. We ask...

How can developing countries successfully implement income taxes, which are generally desirable but costly to collect? This paper analyses the income tax compliance of elites in a developing country with a low administrative capacity, drawing attention to the role of either voluntary or...

Granular microdata is of growing interest within economics and economic history. We present a uniquely detailed database of 21,557 observations of wages and 30,000 observations of prices in rural Denmark for men, women and children, and for both skilled and unskilled workers over the eighteenth...

How can agricultural inheritance traditions affect structural change and economic development in rural areas? The most prominent historical traditions are primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits the whole farm, and equal partition, where land is split and each heir inherits an equal share....

In the aftermath of Brexit there has been increased speculation into what national borders mean for economic and individual wellbeing. Investigating similar events in history can help us understand some of these potential effects. Malmö, a city in modern-day southern Sweden, was a part of...

Did cholera function as a potent catalyst for the reform of urban water infrastructure in 19th century Europe's disease-ridden cities, serving as "our old ally" in the struggle for urban sanitation (Robert Koch)? Based on a detailed case study of Berlin's hydrological reconfiguration, this paper...

This study provides new evidence on the advance of literacy in Spain during the period 1860-1930. A novel dataset, built with historical information (over 8,000 municipalities) from the Spanish population censuses, enables us to describe this process in detail from the end of the Ancien Régime...