This paper examines the effect of the early adoption of technology on the evolution of human capital and on industrialization, in the context of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It shows that wrights, a group of highly skilled mechanical craftsmen, who specialized in water-powered machinery in...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a...

This paper re-examines the late medieval market in freehold land, the extent to which it was governed by market forces as opposed to political or social constraints, and how this contributed to the commercialisation of the late medieval English economy. We employ a valuable new resource for...

In the four decades leading up to World War I, a significant proportion of British aristocrats married daughters of newly rich American business magnates. I provide a quantitative economic analysis of this phenomenon in the deeper context of British aristocratic marriages during the 18th and...

The paper examines an early case of creative accounting, and how, during British industrialization, accounting was enlisted by the manufacturers’ interest to resist demands, led by the ‘Ten hours’ movement, for limiting the working day. In contrast to much of the prior literature, which...

Why did England industrialize first? And why was Europe ahead of the rest of the world? Unified growth theory in the tradition of Galor-Weil (2000) and Galor-Moav (2002) captures the key features of the transition from stagnation to growth over time. Yet we know remarkably little about why...

In this paper, we present a first modelization of Allen's argument on the British Industrial Revolution with a History-Friendly Model heuristic. To do so, we use a macroeconomic micro-founded framework with heterogeneous agents – households, firms, and institutions – interacting through a...

Objective - This study explores the role of quantity surveyors in the procurement of vessels in the Malaysian shipbuilding industry. The study's objectives include defining the quantity surveyors' relevance in the vessels, identifying the skills required of quantity surveyors by shipbuilding...