England's post-Reformation demographic regime has been characterized as "low pressure". Yet the evidence hitherto for the presence of a preventive check, defined as the short-run response of marriage and births to variations in living standards, is rather weak. New evidence in this paper...

Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the...

We provide evidence on household and market production in 36 countries since 1960. On average the household sector accounts for almost half of total hours worked. As GDP per capita increases, the employment share of household production in total hours worked initially declines and then hardly...