This paper evaluates the diffusion of electricity within the context of a GPT perspective. The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to evaluate the hypotheses of a...

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...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...

Is free trade good for growth? Some of the most disturbing evidence to the contrary comes from a period that is often described as the first era of globalization. Studies of the period 1870-1914 have emphasised that protectionist tariff policy was associated with higher rates of economic growth....

Understandably, focus on a transition to a low carbon economy has overshadowed what happens when the transition has been completed. This paper tries to offer lessons about the very long run aspects of a future economy reliant predominantly on renewable energy sources. The evidence is based on...

This paper argues that non-random measurement errors in the estimates of British Gross Domestic Product makes the compromise estimate a biased indicator of medium-term economic growth. Since the compromise estimate of GDP has been widely accepted and used to describe macroeconomic trends in the...

Using a new database for the whole 1900–2000 period, this paper estimates the relative contribution of endogenous and exogenous factors in GDP and productivity growth in each of the six larger Latin American economies with multivariate annual models, and complements these with a single...

This paper empirically explores the relationship between (i) job finding and commuting outcomes and (ii) the relationship between job search and the commute and location outcomes of relocation decisions after finding employment. The relationship between commute outcomes when finding a new job...