Overseers’ vested interests played an important role in shaping local poor relief provision under the Old Poor Law. In the industrial town of Bolton the Relief Order books for the 1820s reveal an unusual emphasis upon the payment of paupers’ rent by the parish. This policy was partly a...

Information technology, like the telephone, influences market access; this paper answers the question about a reverse effect, does market access affect information technology, in particular its adoption?  Using the introduction of the telephone in Bavaria, I demonstrate with a rank, order and...

This paper analyses and quantifies the effects of trade liberalisation and skill-biased technical change, both exogenous and trade-induced, on the skill premium and real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in the Mexican manufacturing sector, using industry- and firm-level data for 1984-1990...

We show in an exchange economy with liquidity constraints that the volume of trade and asset prices depend on both the supply of liquidity by the Central Bank and on the liquidity of assets and commodities.  As a result, monetary aggregates are informative for the assessment of economic...

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history.  The mortality impacts are clearly significant.  But what of the survivors?  This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact...

This paper shows that Zipf's Law for cities can emerge as a property of a clustering process.  If initially uniformly distributed people chose their location based on a specific gravity equation as found in trade studies, they will form cities that follow Zipf's Law in expected value.  This...

This paper develops a revealed preference methodology for exploring whether time inconsistencies in household choice are the product of nonstationarities at the individual level or the result of individual heterogeneity and renegotiation within the collective unit.  An empirical application to...

The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it.  Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I present a...

In contrast to other studies, this paper examines the determinants of short-term child health by controlling for the long-term health status of children.  Using data from rural Ethiopia and linear mixed models that control for individual heterogeneity, the empirical analysis indicate that the...