The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job-creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long-run...

The height of the French male population of the Ancien Régime is estimated, on the basis of military records, to have been about 162 cm in the 17th century. This extremely short stature implies that "the crisis of the 17th century" had an immense impact on the human organism itself. The...