Geography made rural society in the south-east of England unequal. Economies of scale in grain growing created a farmer elite and many landless labourers. In the pastoral north-west, in contrast, family farms dominated, with few hired labourers and modest income disparities. Engerman and...

Most research on the history of inequality in pre-industrial economies has focused on either wealth or income. Characterizing the distribution of wealth (resp., income) is problematic owing to insufficient information about the distribution's low (resp., high) end. Because the sources and...

Although urban growth historically depended on large inflows of migrants, little is known of the process of migration in the era before railways. Here we use detailed data for Paris on women arrested for prostitution in the 1760s, or registered as prostitutes in the 1830s and 1850s; and of men...

This study provides new evidence on the advance of literacy in Spain during the period 1860-1930. A novel dataset, built with historical information (over 8,000 municipalities) from the Spanish population censuses, enables us to describe this process in detail from the end of the Ancien Régime...

Why did France experience the demographic transition first? This question remains one of the greatest puzzles of economics, demography, and economic history. The French pattern is hard to reconcile with elucidations of the process as found in other countries. The present analysis goes back to...

What determines emigration, and what impact does it have on the sending country? We consider the case of Denmark between 1868 and 1908, when a large number of people left for America. A significant fraction of these were tyender, a servant-like occupational group that was heavily discriminated...

Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the "China shock" literature, we hypothesize...

We investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (partition vs. primogeniture)....

This paper analyzes the oversea emigration of German passengers via the port of Bremen in the period of theWeimar Republic (1920-1932). We use a novel micro-dataset of digitalized passengers lists including about 181,000 emigrants as an estimation of the outflow of Germans from the German Reich....