Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually comes in the shape of social tables: inventories of a range of social groups and their mean incomes. These are frequently reported without adjusting for within-group income dispersion, leading to a systematic downward bias in...

This paper presents a new method for calculating Gini coefficients from tabulations of the mean income of social classes. Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually come in the form of such tabulations, called social tables. Inequality indices generated from social...

In diesem Beitrag werden der erste Lastenausgleich, der im Zusammenhang mit der Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1948/1949 stattfand, und der - nicht so benannte - zweite Lastenausgleich nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung 1990 analysiert und verglichen. Beim ersten Lastenausgleich ging...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

Since the Middle Ages the Jews have been engaged primarily in urban, skilled occupations, such as crafts, trade, finance, and medicine. This distinctive occupational selection occurred between the seventh and the ninth centuries in the Muslim Empire and then it spread to other locations. We...

It is our natural inclination to find stable patterns and meaning in the chaotic world around us. This assists in our efforts to understand the past and forecast the future. The starting point of this essay is the phrase "dismal science" which is an often used 'epitheton ornans' of economics....

The human costs of famines outlast the famines themselves. An increasing body of research points to their adverse long-run consequences for those born or in utero during them. This paper offers an introduction to the burgeoning literature on fetal origins and famine through a review of research...

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North America went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is central to recent accounts of long-run economic growth. Prior to the transition, women bore as many...

This research aims to find the determinants of participation on social organizations in Chile through a social capital approach, as well as to evaluate the existence of a positive effect between participation and household welfare. In the case of economic and local organizations several...

Many scholars have argued that once basic needs have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...