At the end of the eighteenth century, England and France both underwent revolutions: France the French Revolution, England the industrial revolution. This note sheds new light on these contrasting experiences in the histories of England and France by looking at the evolution of real consumer...

The role of demography in long-run economic growth has been subject to increasing attention. This paper questions the received wisdom that marital birth control was absent before the nineteenth century. Using an extensive individual-level dataset covering 270,000 births from 80,000 families we...

This paper explores the role of mortality in the long transition from Malthusian stagnation to sustained economic growth. An endogenous child mortality rate that varies inversely with parents’ standard of living is added to the framework in Galor and Weil (AER 2000). In our version of the...

The classical story of industrialization always begins with agriculture: the modernization of rural institutions, involving both the enclosure of 'open fields' and a shift from peasant farming to larger scale capitalist farming, generates a rise in agricultural productivity, which in turn fuels...

An issue often discussed in relation to agricultural development is the effect on agricultural labour productivity of more intensive land-use. Introducing aspects of seasonality into a stylized Malthusian model, we unify two diverging views by showing that labour productivity may go up or down...