The frequency at which age data heap at round ages can be used to infer people’s ability to count. Földvári, Van Leeuwen and Van Leeuwen-Li (FVV) contend that gender specific trends in numeracy derived from age heaping in census data are unreliable because women’s ages are adapted to those...

In this paper we apply a factor analysis with a measurement error model to extract the latent democracy variable from the components of polity2 and Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy, under the assumption that each of these components are driven by a common latent factor with different amount of...

In recent years interest in welfare levels in ancient economies has increased considerably partly as a result of a quest to find the start of modern economic growth. These welfare levels can be calculated in two ways. First, it can be done using GDP per capita, capturing average income in a...

The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would seemingly become an extremely unequal society, with ramifications into modern-day South Africa. In this paper, we measure the income inequality at three different points over the first century of Dutch rule...

Until recently, most economists work on Africa has taken 1960 as the starting point because data on national income and similar derivates are only available back to this point. To date, the quantitative literature on Africa has made heroic leaps of faith, asserting causal relationships across...

On the basis of a newly constructed dataset of the national accounts of the province of Holland in the period between 1347 and 1800, we analyze the pattern of growth in this region, which was one of the most prosperous and dynamic parts of the pre modern European economy. We demonstrate that...

British colonial rule has often been praised for its comparatively benign features, such as its support for local educational development. This paper studies the origins of formal education in sub-Saharan Africa arguing that the beneficial effects of British educational policy should not be...

The emphasis on location-specific factors, such as climate or disease environment, in the explanation of development outcomes in colonial societies implicitly assumes that settler groups were homogenous. Using tax records, this paper shows that the French Huguenots who immigrated to Dutch South...

A new dataset for estimating the development of global inequality between 1820 and 2000 is presented, based on a large variety of sources and methods for estimating (gross household) income inequality. On this basis, and two sets of benchmarks for estimating between-country inequality (the...

Recent research has shown early economies to exhibit market behavior by using institutions that reduce price volatility. In this paper we focus on storage as a price stabilizing strategy in Babylon using a recent dataset with agricultural prices for the Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods...