Today, per capita income differences around the globe are large – varying by as much as a factor of 35 across countries (Hall and Jones 1999). These differentials mostly reflect the "Great Divergence" (Sam Huntingon) – the fact that Western Europe and former European colonies grew rapidly...

We examine the role of substitution from traditional to modern energy carriers and of differential rates of innovation in the use of each of these in Sweden from 1850 to 1950. We use a simple growth model with a nested CES production function and exogenous factor augmenting technological change...

Europeans restricted their fertility long before other parts of the world did so. By raising the marriage age of women, and ensuring that a substantial proportion remained celibate, the "European Marriage Pattern" (EMP) reduced childbirths by up to 40%. We analyze the rise of this first...

While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution has typically been assessed as minor. To resolve this puzzling contrast, we differentiate average human capital (literacy) from upper-tail knowledge. As a proxy for the...

In this paper, we bridge economic data and climatic time series to assess the vulnerability of a pre-industrial economy to changes in climatic conditions. We propose an economic model to extract a measure of total productivity from English data (real wages and land rents) in the pre-industrial...