Despite some disagreements about specific timing, it is now widely accepted that France was the first European country to experience a systematic decline in fertility, a decline that took place in a very distinctive geographical pattern.  Whereas two areas of low birth rates (the Seine valley...

For centuries, economists have struggled to explain why people and businesses gather in cities.

This article reviews beer production, consumption and the industrial organization of breweries throughout history. Monasteries were the centers of the beer economy in the early Middle Ages. Innovation and increased demand later induced the growth of commercial breweries. Globalization and...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, to compare the model of financial stabilization in the interwar period in France (a country in the “core”) with that in Bulgaria (a peripheral country). Second, applying modern econometric techniques (VAR models) we would like to “test...

This essay reexamines the great contributions made by Dr. Ali Al-Gritly to Egypt. He was the finance minister for a short period at the beginning of the 1950s and later was appointed as chairman of the Bank of Alexandria. In 1966, he completed a book (Al-Gritly [1966 (1974)]) on the economic...

From Irving Fisher in 1907 to Jan Tinbergen in 1945 at least eight economists developed the famous diagram used to demonstrate the gains from international trade.

The annual report essay discusses the measurement system used to track U.S. economic activity, and why it is not yet up to the task of effectively measuring aspects of economic activity that contribute the most to long-term economic growth. For historical reasons, our measuring system has...

The spectacularly early decline of French fertility is one of the great puzzles of economic history. There are no convincing explanations for why France entered a fertility transition over a century before anywhere else in the world. This analysis links highly detailed individual level fertility...

We develop a methodology to estimate underlying (continuous) population distributions from bin-aggregated sample data through the estimation of the parameters of mixtures of distributions that allow for maximal parametric flexibility. The statistical approach we develop enables comparisons of...