Recent trade and wages literature focuses on whether trade or technology has been the major source of increases in wage inequality in OECD countries since the 1980s. In this literature, no attention has been paid to demand side considerations. Using a simple heterogeneous goods trade model of...

This paper explores the use of structural models as an alternative to reduced form methods when decomposing observed joint trade and technology driven wage changes into components attributable to each source. Conventional mobile factors Heckscher-Ohlin models typically reveal problems of...

Why was the Industrial Revolution successful at generating sustained growth? Some have argued that there was a fundamental change in the way that new technology was developed during this period, but evidence for this argument remains largely anecdotal. This paper provides direct quantitative...

This article develops a method for quantitatively tracking the agenda of the British Parliament--by which I mean the substantive topics on which Parliamentary debate was focused--from 1810-2005 using descriptions of 1.7 million Parliamentary debates from the Parliamentary Hansard. This provides...

How do communication costs affect the production of new ideas and inventions? To answer this question, we study the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in Great Britain in 1840. This reform replaced the previous system of expensive distance-based postage fees with a uniform low rate of one...

The historical fertility transition is one of the most important events in economic history. This study provides new evidence on the role that ideas about family planning played in this transition. We begin by documenting a link between the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial that took place in...

We describe the history of state pension policy in the UK since 1948 and calculate summary measures of the generosity of the system over time and the degree to which the it created implicit taxes on, or subsidies to, work at older ages. The time series of these measures, calculated separately...

This paper sets out alternatives to the traditional model of labour supply used to analyse the welfare costs of income and/or sales taxes when preferences are defined over goods and leisure and the market wage yields the slope of the budget constraint. The innovation in our work is to assume...

The late 1980s saw a major shift in pension provision in the United Kingdom, when for the first time individuals were permitted to opt out of part of the social security program into individual retirement saving accounts (Personal Pensions). At the same time, membership of company-provided...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...