This paper details the statistical sources, methods and findings that underpin the demographic evidence offered by Johansson (2010) in support of her thesis regarding “Europe’s first knowledge-driven mortality transition,” namely the pronounced and sustained rise in the expectations of...

The Zollverein, the German customs union of 1834, was the institutional centrepiece of Germany’s economic unification. A bargaining model is applied to analyze the structure of its negotiation process and accession sequence. The existence of negative coalition externalities, the effect of a...

Cotton textile firms led the development of machinery-based industrialization in the Industrial Revolution. This paper presents price and profits data extracted from the accounting records of three cotton firms between the 1770s and the 1820s. The course of prices and profits in cotton textiles...

In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income. This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993, Voth (1998,2000). This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour supply...

Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries English peasants faced large income shocks relative to mean incomes. Innovations in property rights over land induced peasants to respond by trading small parcels of land as part of their risk coping strategy. The same period witnessed a dramatic...

Among affluent countries, those with market-liberal welfare regimes (which are also English-speaking) tend to have the highest prevalence of obesity. The impact of cheap, accessible high-energy food is often invoked in explanation. An alternative approach is that overeating is a response to...

We propose a new, easy-to-implement, class of payment rules, “Reference Rules,” to make core-selecting package auctions more robust. Small, almost riskless, profitable deviations from “truthful bidding” are often easy for bidders to find under currently-used payment rules. Reference...

I show that the fiscal position of the UK means it will be very hard for the next government to allow the undergraduate fee cap to increase beyond the rate of inflation. The funding position of the higher education sector can be improved by the government removing the interest rate subsidy it...

We investigate the properties of the composite likelihood (CL) method for (T ×N_T ) GARCH panels. The defining feature of a GARCH panel with time series length T is that, while nuisance parameters are allowed to vary across N_T series, other parameters of interest are assumed to be common. CL...