Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has...

Enclosures enforced private property rights at the onset of industrialization, yet numerous estimations of the enclosures' effects on production and productivity rely on non-experimental designs. We estimate the causal effects of enclosure reforms applying state- of-the-art...

Adam Smith made two positive claims about slavery in the context of developing economies. First, Smith argued that slavery was in general highly inefficient. By his account, the net product under freedom is 12 times larger than under slavery. Second, he observes that, despite its inefficiencies,...

We study the effect of changes in land tenure, launched by the 1906 Stolypin reform, on agricultural productivity in late Imperial Russia. The reform allowed peasants to obtain land titles and consolidate separated land strips into single allotments. Our estimations suggest that the net effect...

Economists and economic historians have generally understood different forms of land tenure as arrangements for the supply of labor. This paper suggests a different interpretation -- that land-tenure arrangements be understood rather as arrangements for the supply of financing. The cost and...

The expansion of trade in pre-industrial Europe led to a transformation of agriculture. It induced specialization to exploit comparative advantage as well as a restructuring of the process of production, with manorial agriculture giving way to an agriculture of family farms. Technological...

Russian Abstract: В работе рассматривается вопрос о влиянии населенности крестьянского двора на доходность помещичьих имений. Автор приходит к выводу о наличии прямой...

According to economic theory, the clear definition of property rights is essential for well-functioning markets. Comparatively little attention, however, is given to explaining the development of these rights. Economic reasoning suggests that markets themselves call property rights into...

Greek Abstract: Το κεφάλαιο εξετάζει τις σχέσεις κράτους και οικονομίας κατά το 19ο και 20ο αιώνα στην Ελλάδα. Επιχειρεί καταρχήν μια τυπολογική έρευνα αυτών των σχέσεων...