In 1795 the British took control of the Cape colony (South Africa) from the Dutch; and in 1843 they exogenously changed the legal basis of landholding, giving more secure property rights to landholders. Since endowments and other factors were held constant, these changes offer clean tests of the...

From 1770 to 1914, the British Government collected weekly price and quantity data for all types of grain traded in many market towns; these 'Corn Returns' were published in the London Gazette. We computerized the data published between 1770 and 1864, totalling around 6 million data points. Here...

We show that vector error correction models encompass different approaches to analysing market integration; we illustrate our method using English weekly wheat prices, 1770–1820. Price variation decomposes into: (i) magnitude of price shocks; (ii) correlation of price shocks; (iii)...

We estimate a model of wheat yields for eighteenth century England using village-level data. This is an entirely new approach to quantifying progress during the Agricultural Revolution and enables us to consider both environmental and technological inputs. We find that climate was a crucial...