This paper provides estimates of wage dispersion in nineteenth-century Barcelona and documents the compression of the pay distribution between 1856 and 1905. A decomposition of inequality changes by sector and gender leads to two conclusions. First, that most of the changes occurred within each...

This paper provides a case study of the parliamentary enclosure of Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire. A collection of nearly eighty letters reveals the often-acrimonious negotiations over the draft clauses of the enclosure bill, and the extent of the concessions needed to overcome opposition to...

Accounts of the British fertility decline have turned on the rise of the male breadwinner family, which by placing the responsibility for supporting women and children on men converted them to a preference for smaller families. This paper uses working-class autobiography of the eighteenth and...

The importance of fiscal policy for the inflationary process in Germany in the early 1920s has long been recognised, and at the same time the room for reform has been viewed as very limited. This paper will address this question anew by away of counterfactual analysis. Taking the railways -...

The English family in the early modern period is viewed in the perspective of reciprocity: an exchange of goods that involves giving and obtaining something in return. Reciprocal interactions between parents and children extended throughout the life course and were not confined to infancy or...

The rescue of persecuted minorities - such as the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe -is seen in this paper as taking place in a peculiar market. In such a market rescuers face at least two dilemmas. Firstly, they might be willing to help but be uncertain how to go about rescuing. Secondly, they might...

Studies of consumption in early modern Europe fall into two groups. Some have looked at the overall supply of nutritional components to the average consumer in an attempt to trace standards of living. Others have examined the changing demand for particular goods by specific consumers to...

Analysis of new comparable series on output and employment between 1900 and 2000 for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela indicates that productivity growth was significantly higher and less volatile during the middle decades of the century than in the opening and closing...