The Malthusian “preventive check” mechanism has been well documented for preindustrial England through evidence for a negative correlation between the marriage rate and the price of wheat. Other literature, however, speculates that the correlation was in fact positive from the early...

This paper presents estimates of agricultural productivity (net value added per full-time labour unit) for 21 German regions for the years 1880/4, 1893/7 and 1905/9. The estimates are derived from regional accounts for agricultural production and costs. The methods used to draw up these accounts...

The early twelfth century was notable for the centralization and consolidation of royal governance in the centre as well as the periphery of Europe. This paper presents a model of medieval kingship in which consent for the king’s rule is founded upon a network of bargains and agreements...

In the sociology of religion of the past thirty years or so, one can identify three major approaches to the relation of religion and modernity: secularization theory, the Stark-Bainbridge rational choice theory, and the Finke-Stark “supply-side” theory. In this paper, I study churchgoing...

I argue that the economy of the early Roman Empire was primarily a market economy. The parts of this economy located far from each other were not tied together as tightly as markets often are today, but they still functioned as part of a comprehensive Mediterranean market. This conclusion is...

This paper undertakes an empirical analysis of the effects of the threst of takeover on company performance, based on a panel of 643 nonfinancial quoted UK companies over the period 1989-96. Our measure of the intensity of the threat of takeover is the predicted probability of takeover estimated...

The paper focuses on the effects of the integration in a perfect world capital market of two large economies running respectively a pay-as-you-go and a fully funded pension system. Under the assumption that the pay-as-you-go is in steady state and self financing, the integration causes changes...

The often volatile behaviour of UK house prices between 1957 and 1994 is analysed in an annual econometric model. Theory suggests that financial liberalization of mortgage markets in the 1980s should have led to notable shifts in house price behaviour.