This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and...

This paper studies the relation between patterns of long-term economic growth and indeterminacy of equilibrium in an endogenous growth model with human capital formation. By introducing sector-specific externalities and a non-separable utility function into the Lucas model, we show that multiple...

The types of technical progress referred to in the theory of economic growth are passed in review and their relations studied in detail. Light is also shed on the dependence of the long-run rate of growth, in the presence of a constant rate of saving, on the type of technical progress taking...

Religion was one of the factors that was frequently identified by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economists as exerting an important influence on the pre-industrial European economies. These writers were especially interested in the economic effects of the Reformation on the economic...

One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...

The traditional and almost universal method of expressing real wages is by index numbers, according to the formula: RWI = NWI/CPI: i.e., the real wage is the quotient of the nominal (money) wage index divided by the consumer price index, all employing a common base period (here: 1451-75 = 100)....

The article responds to Daniele and Malanima’s harsh criticism (Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro? Il Mezzogiorno fra storia e pubblicistica, Rivista di Storia Economica, 2014, n. 1) of my last book (Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro, Il Mulino, 2013), about the reconstruction of regional...

The paper examines an early case of creative accounting, and how, during British industrialization, accounting was enlisted by the manufacturers’ interest to resist demands, led by the ‘Ten hours’ movement, for limiting the working day. In contrast to much of the prior literature, which...

This article re-examines Earl Hamilton’s famous 1929 thesis on ‘Profit Inflation’ and the ‘birth of modern industrial capitalism’: namely, that the inflationary forces of the Price Revolution era produced a widening gap between prices and wages, thus providing industrial entrepreneurs...