Enclosures enforced private property rights at the onset of industrialization, yet numerous estimations of the enclosures' effects on production and productivity rely on non- experimental designs. We estimate the causal effects of enclosure reforms applying state- of-the-art...

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has...

We analyse output risk in Italian agriculture over the period 1870- 1914. We use data on a set of 16 tenanted plots grouped into three farms comprising a single large estate. We estimate the degree of risk associated with each separate crop, with the portfolio of crops at the level of the plot,...

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has...

Enclosures enforced private property rights at the onset of industrialization, yet numerous estimations of the enclosures' effects on production and productivity rely on non-experimental designs. We estimate the causal effects of enclosure reforms applying state- of-the-art...

This paper explores the role of agriculture in Spain's contribution to the little divergence in Europe. On the basis of tithes collected by historians over the years, long-run trends in agricultural output are drawn. After a long period of relative stability, output suffered a severe contraction...

In Malthusian economies, crop shortages could be a matter of life and death. The development of regional and national markets for grain held the potential to provide insurance against the demographic consequences of local crop failure. Weather shocks that are reflected in price data, however,...

Today, one of the greatest challenges facing macroeconomic history is to quantify economic growth in the early modern period. This paper presents and discusses a series of total and per capita harvest production in Sweden within present borders for the period 1665-1820. The series is based on...

The trade of wheat and wool has been one of the economic pillars of the Kingdom of Naples during Modern Age. Since Romans times the production of these commodities – in the continental part of the Kingdom – has been regulated by the trashumance system that coordinated the flow of sheep on...

IThis article: a) analyzes the evolution of biological innovations in wheat varieties from the middle of nineteenth century to the end of twentieth century, in Britain, France, Spain and Italy, and b) shows that when we consider that aspect of the technological changes in agriculture, it...