This paper examines the relationship between income and witch trials in early modern Europe. We start by using climate data to proxy for income levels. This builds on previous work by exploiting a far richer panel dataset covering 356 regions and 260 years, including both seasonal temperature...

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,...

This paper shows that railroad building in Russia, as in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, improved the value of land, a classic benefit of transportation investment in largely agrarian countries. From a database constructed for this paper, we use cross-sectional data for the fifty...

Previous studies on the value of terroir, or more generally geographical indications (GI), used hedonic techniques. We use historical data and exploit temporal and geographical variations in the introduction of wine GIs in early twentieth century France to study the impact on the price of...

We estimate the height of various European populations in the first half of the 18th century. English and Irish male heights are estimated at c. 65 inches (165 cm), and c. 66 inches (168 cm) respectively. These values are below those obtained from the only other sample available for the period...

Throughout western Europe, beginning about 1200, leasing of lords' estates became more common relative to direct management. In England, however, direct management increased beginning around the same time and until the fourteenth century, and leasing increased thereafter. This article models...

In the period between 1300 and 1800 as many as one million people were executed in Europe for the crime of witchcraft. Although a variety of theories about the witch-hunts have been put forward over time, little has been said about the possibility that the witch-hunts were motivated by a desire...