Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the...

We investigate by how much the Little Ice Age reduced the harvests on which pre-industrial Europeans relied for survival. We find that weather strongly affected crop yields, but can find little evidence that western Europe experienced long swings or structural breaks in climate. Instead, annual...

We analyze the timing and extent of northern European temperature falls during the Little Ice Age, using standard temperature reconstructions. However, we can find little evidence of long swings or structural breaks in European weather before the twentieth century. Instead, European weather...

The ramifications of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures straddling several centuries in northwestern Europe, reach far beyond meteorology into economic, political, and cultural history. The LIA has spawned a series of resonant images that range from frost fairs to contracting...

Using Department of Environment data on number of mortgages by size category we find that the Weibull distribution accurately models the distribution of loans under €300,000 but severely underestimates the number of larger loans. We therefore use a a Pareto distribution for loans above this...

This paper surveys the results of four recent, separate attempts at estimating agricultural output and food availability in England and Wales at points between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. It highlights their contrasting implications for trends in economic growth and...

England's post-Reformation demographic regime has been characterized as low pressure. Yet the evidence hitherto for the presence of a preventive check, defined as the short-run response of marriage and births to variations in living standards, is rather weak. New evidence in this paper...

This paper models corruption as optimal parasitism in organizations where teams of agents are weakly restrained by principals. Each agent takes on part of the role of principal, choosing how much to invest in policing to repress corruption in others and how rapaciously to act when unpoliced...