In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income.  This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993), Voth (1998, 2000)).  This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour...

What were the economic consequences of the usury doctrine in the Middle Ages?  We examine how merchants attempted to evade the prohibition on interest and the attempts of the Church to clamp down on evasion.  Contrary to the views of many economists and historians, the usury prohibition...

Home advantage in football varies over time. Existing theories of home advantage struggle to explain this time-series variation. We argue that the decline in home advantage in English football since the mid-1980s was partly caused by the advent of televised football. We argue that the increase...

In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income. This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993, Voth (1998,2000). This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour supply...

Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe produced drastically different responses.  In Germany, a liberal variant known as Reform developed, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe.  We develop a model of religious organization which explains this polarization.  In...

In early nineteenth-century England, there was no professional police force and most prosecutions were private. This paper examines how associations for the prosecution of felons arose to internalize the positive externalities produced by private prosecutions. Drawing upon new historical...

In pre-industrial economies labor supply curves bent backwards at very low levels of income. This changed in England before the industrial revolution (de Vries, 1994, 2008; Voth, 1998). Using a model of labor supply where consumption takes time, this paper shows that both an increase in the cost of...

This paper explores the rise of the fiscal state in the early modern period and its impact on legal capacity. To measure legal capacity, we establish that witchcraft trials were more likely to take place where the central state had weak legal insti- tutions. Combining data on the geographic...

The development of capital markets in medieval Europe was shaped for centuries by the religious ban on lending money at interest. This paper examines how this prohibition developed as the outcome of strategic behavior by religious, commercial and political elites. A model is developed to analyze...