Evidence on the pre-modern relationship between wealth and fertility has so far almost entirely relied upon data from Europe. We use British colonial records from early 19th-century India on widow suicides (satis) to show that there is a robust positive relationship between income and fertility.

In this paper I examine the concept of "vulnerability" within the context of income mobility of the poor. While the concept of poverty is well developed, the concept of vulnerability is less established in the economic literature. I test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UK using...

We investigate the relationship between mortality decline and urbanization, which has hitherto been proposed by demographers but has yet to be tested. Using pooled-OLS, fixed effects first differences and long differences we find evidence for a robust negative correlation between crude death...

The importance of pre-colonial history on contemporary African development has become an important field of study within development economics in recent years. In particular (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007) suggest that pre-colonial political centralization has had an impact on contemporary levels of...