We model demographic and economic long-run development in a setting where mortality is endogenous and subject to epidemic shocks. The model replicates the full transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. Consistent with the historical facts, the economy also passes an intermediate...

We present a growth model where agents divide time between rent seeking in the form of resource competition and working in a human capital sector. The latter is interpreted as trade or manufacturing. Rent seeking exerts negative externalities on the productivity of human capital. Adding shocks,...

rates in 18th- and 19th-century Sweden with a seven-grade scale over harvest outcomes in the county where the parish was located. We …find a Malthusian pattern: a good harvest one year leads to lower death rates, and higher birth and marriage rates, in particular the following year; for death...

It may thus serve a ruler’s reproductive interests to be subject to an institution which limits the number of wives he (or anyone who successfully ousts him) can take. Moreover, our model suggests how such marriage norms can arise endogenously in the course of economic development, as an...

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies. We explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labour as inputs in production and an endogenously determined property...

The effects of political fragmentation on long-run development seem to have changed over the course of human history. Technological leaders used to be empires, but the Industrial Revolution started in the fragmented Europe. This paper sets up a model to help us think about this puzzle. There are...

Abstract: The long-run growth model of Galor and Weil (AER 2000) is examined quantitatively. We first give parametric forms to some functions which were only given on general form in the original article. We then choose numerical parameter values in line with calibrations of related long-run...

Marrying individuals' consent has been requirement for marriage in Europe since the Middle Ages - in most of the rest of the world parental consent reigned until at least until the 1950s. This paper investigates the role of consent in marriage for intra-household allocation of resources and...

We explain per-capita income gaps across US states and Canadian provinces by the following chain of causation. Geography determined where Europeans originally settled: in Northeastern USA, along those segments of the Atlantic coast where the climate was neither too hot (the US South), nor too...

We present a growth model where agents divide time between rent seeking in the form of resource competition; and working in a human capital sector, interpreted as trade or manufacturing. Rent seeking exerts negative externalities on the productivity of human capital, generating multiple steady...