This paper surveys the results of four recent, separate attempts at estimating agricultural output and food availability in England and Wales at points between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. It highlights their contrasting implications for trends in economic growth and...

This paper surveys the results of four recent, separate attempts at estimating agricultural output and food availability in England and Wales at points between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. It highlights their contrasting implications for trends in economic growth and...

We estimate a time series model of weather shocks on English wheat yields for the early nineteenth century and use it to predict weather effects on yield levels from 1697 to 1871. This reveals that yields in the 1690s were depressed by unusually poor weather; and those in the late 1850s were...

"Evidence-based medicine” approaches began to be formalized in the early 1990s to promote a conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in decision-making on care for individual patients. These approaches were subsequently extended to other spheres of public decision...

This paper re-examines the classic demographic or 'real' model, essentially based on a Malthusian-Ricardian model, that the late Michael Postan (Cambridge) utilized to explain the behaviour of the later-medieval western European economy, and in particular the behaviour of price movements. In...

Using a simple framework, I reexamine the Hayashi and Prescott hypothesis (2006) that a barrier to labor mobility that maintained high agricultural employment was a cause of the stagnation in the prewar Japanese economy. I find that the labor misallocation between the agricultural and...

This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I...

We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the...

In this paper, the author analyzes the roll of the legal framework that prevails in Mexico on agrarian concerns, since the reform of 1992, in a context of the neoliberal economical model imposed on Latin America from the poles of international power and decision. En este documento se analiza el...