Do factor endowments explain serfdom? Domar (1970) conjectured that high land-labor ratios caused serfdom by increasing incentives to coerce labor. But historical evidence is mixed and quantitative analyses are lacking. Using the Acemoglu-Wolitzky (2011) framework and controlling for political...

This paper deals with the rural-urban migration of families in the last decades of the 19th century in one of the most developed regions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy - the Pilsen region. The analysis indicates that the household head's expected real rural-urban wage gap was not the main...