This article mobilizes and integrates both existing and new time series data on real wages, physical heights and age-heaping to examine the long-term trend of living standards and human capital for China during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Our findings confirm the existence of a...

There are many similarities between the US, the UK and the Chinese housing markets, including the movements of interest rates and house prices. Some Chinese banks, especially the Bank of China, have been exposed to the US mortgage securitization market. These have triggered a serious concern as...

Past studies of the Chinese Great Leap Forward famine focus on its causality or the economics effects, but few examine the welfare of the survivors. Thirty million people may have died. Human height, an indicator of nutrition, is used to examine the impact on the survivors of the famine who were...

Empirical tests of market integration are tests of price differences across locations with only tenuous reference to economic theory. We develop a simple model that illustrates the links between price convergence and the gains from trade, providing a theoretical rationale for empirical analysis....

Height data are a useful and concise summary measure of human welfare for historical populations in absence of conventional economical data. Most historical studies use the final attained height of adults aged between about 20-23 and 49 years on the premise that younger subjects were still...