Networks of Church and State that originated in premodern times played an important role as conduits for the transmission of cultural values that have endured into the present and set the economic history of China apart from that of Europe. The imprints of those networks, which preceded the...

This paper documents a language change in printing from Latin to the vernaculars, the spoken tongues, in the immediate aftermath of the Protestant Reformation of 1517. As a result, the share of vernacular titles in Europe rose from around 30% in 1500 to almost 60% in 1600. With the increased use...

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...

The European Marriage Pattern (EMP), in place in NW Europe for perhaps 500 years, substantially limited fertility. But how could such limitation persist when some individuals who deviated from the EMP norm had more children? If their children inherited their deviant behaviors, their descendants...

Government had an enormous impact on economic growth and development in pre-industrial Europe. Mostly, this was unintended - a side effect, for example, of government exaction or of the waging of war. However, governments did also intervene in their economies deliberately. These interventions...

Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occurred gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth...

How did Europe escape the "Iron Law of Wages?" We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors and multiple steady states, and use it to explain why European per capita incomes and urbanization rates increased during the period 1350-1700. Productivity growth can only explain a small...

In pre-industrial Europe, many of the functions performed today by large corporations and governments were performed by merchant associations of various types - merchant guilds, regulated companies, merchant-controlled cities, and merchant colonies. Merchant association provided their members...

This paper documents that the Rise of (Western) Europe between 1500 and 1850 is largely accounted for by the growth of European nations with access to the Atlantic, and especially by those nations that engaged in colonialism and long distance oceanic trade. Moreover, Atlantic ports grew much...