Estimates are produced for differences between the ceteris paribus earnings of union and non-union workers in the UK and the US over time.

Many observers believe that times are growing harder for young people in Western society. This paper looks at the evidence and finds that conventional wisdom appears to be wrong.

Gender bias against girls in nineteenth-century England has received much interest but establishing its existence has proved difficult.  We utilise data on heights of 16,402 children working in northern textile factories in 1837 to examine whether gender bias was evident.  Current...

Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates.  We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the rest of the...

While the impact of globalization on income inequality has received a lot of attention, little is known about its effect on the gender wage gap (GWG).  This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the GWG between exporting firms and non-exporters.  By the virtue of being exposed...

We exploit a unique opportunity to study how a large population of players in the field learn to play a novel game with a complicated and non-intuitive mixed strategy equilibrium.  We argue that standard models of belief-based learning and reinforcement learning are unable to explain the data,...

Trust in political institutions has declined across developed democracies.  One of the main reasons cited for this lack of trust in public opinion polls has been the role of money in politics.  The Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon, amongst others, have increased the...

Ethnic residential segregation is usually investigated using a constrained-choice approach. This study explains the variation in post-war Afro-Caribbean segregation in fifteen British cities by means of historical patterns of economic opportunity. Its dependent variable is newly available census...

It is commonly accepted that the decline of the Wests woollen industry was in large part due to the greater employment of steam power by the Yorkshire industry. Using the account books of the Stroudwater Canal Company, the article examines the role of the Stroudwater Canal in bringing coal to...

Britain already had a serious unemployment problem in the 1920s, but the situation worsened markedly after 1929. We investigate the cause of the higher rates of unemployment experienced throughout the 1930s. The most obvious explanation, that aggregate demand was weaker in the aftermath of the...