The link between demographic pressure and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland has long interested economists. This paper re-visits the topic, harnessing the highly disaggregated parish-level data from the 1841 Census of Ireland. Using population per value adjusted acre as a measure of...

This short paper revisits two questions that were central to Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved (2nd edition, 1985). These are, first, what determined the variation in population change across Ireland during the Great Famine decade of 1841-1851 and, second, whether and in what sense can pre-famine...

This paper complements a much larger study of school attendance in pre-famine Ireland by FitzGerald (2010). It exploits some of the data generated by that study to analyze further some of the determinants of schooling and literacy in the 1820s and 1840s. -- Ireland ; Economic history ; Literacy...