Trends in living standards during the Industrial Revolution is a core debate in economic history. Studies using anthropometric records from institutional sources have found downward trends in living standards during the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper contributes to this...

Are return migrants 'losers' who fail to adapt to the challenges of the host economy, and thereby exacerbate the brain drain linked to emigration? Or are they 'winners' whose return enhances the human and physical capital of the home country? These questions are the subject of a burgeoning...

This paper explores the relationship between Nazi membership and social mobility using a unique and highly detailed dataset of military conscripts and volunteers during the Third Reich. We find that membership of a Nazi organisation is positively related to social mobility when measured by the...

What impact do famines have on survivors? We use individual-level data on a population exposed to severe famine conditions during infancy to document two opposing effects. The first: exposure to insufficient food and a worsened disease environment is associated with poor health into adulthood -...

Prior to the Age of Mass Migration, Germans left central Europe to settle primarily in modernday Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine and Russia. Despite the harsh conditions that the first generation of settlers had to endure, their descendants often fared better, not worse, compared to native...

We apply insights from the political economy of secession to analyse the early years of the Irish Free State (IFS). The IFS was fortuitous in a debt settlement that enabled it to begin its existence debt free, whilst also receiving financial assistance to quell civil unrest. Yet the IFS was...

Economic history is integral to the study of economics and economies. Besides providing students with a valuable long-run perspective on the modern world, the field also helps them to better understand the contingency of economic theory. Despite a newfound interest in economic history among...

Who financed the great expansion of the Victorian equity market, and what attracted them to invest? Using data on 453 firm-years and over 172,000 shareholders, we find that the largest providers of capital were rentiers, men with no formal occupation who relied on investment income. We also see...

This paper employs a variety of economic and financial indicators to examine the relationship between Roman Catholicism and Irish development in the Post-Famine period. County-level decennial data are used for all census years from 1871 to 1911, and Catholicism is instrumented using the distance...

This paper presents new monthly capital gains, dividend yield, and total return indices for common equities quoted on British stock exchanges from 1829 to 1929. As well as creating an all-share index, we create a blue-chip index of the 30 largest companies, which we splice to the Financial Times...