Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from...

There is a rich scholarly literature on sovereign default on external debt. Comparatively little is known about sovereign defaults on domestic debt. Even today, cross-country data on domestic public debt remains curiously exotic, particularly prior to the 1980s. We have filled this gap in the...

Between 1660 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by inheritance rules and other legal legacies. The loosening of...

Recent work emphasizes the primacy of differences in countries' colonially-bequeathed property rights and legal systems for explaining differences in their subsequent economic development. Barbados and Jamaica provide a striking counter example to this long-run view of income determination. Both...

The state of Indiana set out to build a Mammoth system of canals, railroads, and turnpikes in 1836, after a decade of intense debate in which sectional rivalries prevented any state action. This paper investigates the role played by the adoption of an ad valorem property tax in ameliorating the...

In October 1993, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to Robert William Fogel and Douglass Cecil North `for having renewed research in economic history.' The Academy noted that `they were pioneers in the branch of economic history that has been called the...

The author argues that although the collapse of the Doha “Development” Round in early summer of 2006 was triggered by the refusal of the United States to agree to the reduction of the ceiling on the amount of domestic subsidies paid to the US farmers, there were some fundamental reasons...

This article is in the first place an attempt to provide evidence of specialization on the basis of a number of Dutch maritime shipping sources. Related topics such as employment, the question of demand and supply, the characteristics of good streams or the everlasting “homeport of the ship or...

Like many countries, Spain has gone through a series of financial crises, both before and after its industrialization. There are many underlying causes for these crises, as well as for the current Spanish downturn. It is worth noting that there are similarities between recessions throughout the...

The article refers to a definition of globalisation in three perspectives, namely the development of territorial boarders and in particular the redefinition of regions, the development of the division of labour and distribution of power, and the changed role of culture. The latter is thereby not...