While land reforms are typically pursued in order to raise productivity and reduce inequality across households, an unintended consequence may be increased within-household gender inequality. We analyse a tenancy registration programme in West Bengal, and find that it increased child survival...

We estimate calories available to workers' households in the USA, Belgium, Britain, France and Germany in 1890/1. We employ data from the United States Commissioner of Labor survey (see Haines, 1979) of workers in key export industries. We estimate that households in the USA, on average, had...

Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits among individuals, a significant component of the differences in inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in...

This research explores the persistent effect of the Neolithic Revolution on the evolution of life expectancy in the course of human history. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the onset of the Neolithic Revolution and the associated rise in infectious diseases triggered...

We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country's Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-1901 period. We...

Industrialization is vital for inclusive and sustainable global development. The two engines of industrialization – innovation and trade – are in danger of being compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic, under conditions increasingly reminiscent of the medieval world. It comes at a...

Female labor force participation rates across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have remained low for over four decades, despite the fact that in the same period, women's education rapidly increased and fertility rates substantially decreased. This surprising phenomenon has remained...

The worldwide obesity epidemic has impacted women more heavily than men. These gender-based differences are particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region where gender obesity gaps on average exceed 10 percentage points. This paper examines one of the explanations,...