Age heaping-based numeracy indicators have served as valuable tools to derive basic human capital estimates, especially for periods where other indicators are unavailable. However, the accuracy of individual age statements usually remains unknown, and due to the lack of precise information it...

Emigrants from Italy and Ireland contributed disproportionately to the Age of Mass Migration. That their departure improved the living standards of those they left behind is hardly in doubt. Nevertheless, a voluminous literature on the selectivity of migrant flows - both from sending and...

The Renaissance era in Western Europe was marked by a flourishing of economic and cultural life that gave rise to numerous discoveries and inventions. This paper studies the role played by Greek migrants in this process. Using a newly constructed dataset on Greek migrants in Europe after the...

We argue that market forces shaped the geographic distribution of upper-tail human capital across Europe during the Middle Ages, and contributed to bolstering universities at the dawn of the Humanistic and Scientiffc Revolutions. We build a unique database of thousands of scholars from...

This paper examines the effects of emigration on human capital accumulation at origin throughout a century. I focus on the mass emigration from Galicia (Spain) to Latin America (1900-1930), one of the largest emigration episodes at the time. I construct a database of all Galician municipalities...

The organization of the Prussian school system still affects the German education system of today. Against the background of end-of-nineteenth-Prussia this thesis analyzes how education funding emerges in a federal system and how it affects prosperity and nation building in a setting of...

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly...