Mortgage markets in developing economies are often confined to private networks. Inadequate registration of property rights has been blamed for this, but it is questionable whether registration provides a simple and complete solution. This paper addresses this issue by analysing the Low...

In this paper we try to establish the link between book production and the spread of “ideas” as proxied by patents. Two mechanisms may be distinguished. First, in the initial phase of economic development, the production of books may stimulate the accumulation of knowledge already present in...

Over the last 200 years, an upward trend in democracy has been observed both cross-nationally and within nations. Previous studies attributed a major role to the developmental, historical, and more recently diffusional characteristics in explaining this democratization process. Although these...

This study quantifies the importance of the Roman military for the development of a market economy in north-western Europe. Distributions of low denomination coins show how the Roman arrival kick-started a local market economy. Additionally settlement densities of fluvial catchments are used as...

Inequality studies tend to assume a positive correlation between income and wealth inequality. We doubt whether this holds for Rhineland welfare states as they seem to combine low income inequality with high wealth inequality levels. We hypothesize that publicly funded life-time income security,...

The beguine movement is in many ways one of the most remarkable movements in the history of the Low Countries; the impetus for the movement as a whole still remains to be explained. Factors such as the sex-ratio, diminished access to convents, and the religious revival of the late Middle Ages...

In this paper we address several issues, all with the underlying intention of refining and reorienting the nuclear-hardship-debate. There is a need for such reorientation of the debate as several indicators show that the long-term outcome of this process towards a society built upon nuclear...

The old Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries of Western Europe faced new testing economic conditions by the late Middle Ages. Gifts and donations to the institutions had dried up, the manorial system and serfdom were on the wane, and furthermore, these old monasteries faced competition from...

At the end of the eighteenth century, England and France both underwent revolutions: France the French Revolution, England the industrial revolution. This note sheds new light on these contrasting experiences in the histories of England and France by looking at the evolution of real consumer...

This paper examines age at first marriage for women and spousal age gap as an indicator for female agency from 1950 until 2005. Using a dataset of 77 LDCs this paper seeks to explore which variables determine differences at a country level in marriage patterns. We look at the influence of...