This paper uses the censuses of 1842 of Canada East (modern day Quebec) and Canada West (modern day Ontario) to help explain the historical differences in living standards between Canada and the United States. The argument made in this paper is that Canada East was substantially poorer than the...

The Cuban government often vaunts its accomplishment of a low infant mortality rate post 1959. However, because many Latin American countries experienced similar decreases, and because Cuba has historically enjoyed lower infant mortality rates than the rest of the sub-continent, it is unclear...

Douglass North is known largely for his work on institutions (1981; 1990; 1991; 2005; North and Thomas 1973; North, Wallis and Weingast 2009). This legitimate emphasis on this segment of his work overshadows his earlier contributions regarding the empirical measurement of the past. Yet, when awarding him the Nobel...

This paper argues that significant transfers from peasants to landlords through private taxes and duties under seigneurial law in the French colonies in North America in the eighteenth century have been underestimated. They represented a burden equal to 5.19% to 6.89% of income. This high...

We argue that institutions are bundles that involve trade-offs in the government’s ability to provide public goods that affect public health. We hypothesize that economic freedom reduces diseases of poverty and may increase diseases of commerce (those associated with free movement of people,...

The wage gap between higher-earning English-speaking workers and those of the French-speaking majority, that had long characterized Quebec’s labour market, vanished between 1970 and 2000. We unveil a new empirical fact: the closing of the wage gap occurred through the replacement of older...

The rise of the “New History of Capitalism” as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the “New History of Capitalism,” and explain how the different...

A long-standing item of interest in Canadian economic history is the “agricultural crisis” that apparently plagued the large colony of Quebec during the first half of the nineteenth century. One particularly resilient explanation of the crisis claims that cultural conservatism made the...