Leandro Prados de La Escosura is a professorat the University of Charles III in Madrid In a new EHES working paper, Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Universidad Carlos III and CEPR) analyses wellbeing which is widely seen as a multi-dimensional phenomenon affected not only by material goods, but also health, education, agency and freedom, environment, […]

Nuno Palma is an Assistant Professor at the University of Manchester New EHES Working Paper by Nuno Palma (Manchester University) is available here.Classic accounts of the English industrial revolution present a long period of stagnation followed by a fast take-off. However, recent findings of slow but steady per capita economic growth suggest that this is a historically inaccurate portrait […]

Mikołaj Malinowski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellowat Utrecht University and Lund University New EHES Working Paper by Mikołaj Malinowski (Lund University – Utrecht University) is available here. What factors allowed certain regions of Europe to develop their market economies early on and what were the reasons for the relative stagnation of the less successful areas? Specifically, […]

New EHES working paper by Alexandra M. de Pleijt (University of Oxford) and  Jan Luiten van Zanden (Utrecht University). The paper can be accessed here. Jan Luiten van Zanden is a Full Professor of Global Economic History at Utrecht University Sandra de Pleijt is a post-doctoral research fellow at Oxford University It is generally acknowledged that the […]

Leandro Prados de la Escosura  (Universidad Carlos III, Groningen, and CEPR) Abstract of the new EHES working paper by Leandro Prados de la Escosura. The paper is available here.  In the last one and a half centuries, substantial gains are observed for well-being dimensions beyond per capita GDP (including health, education, political voice, civil liberties, and […]

Abstract of the new EHES working paper: Jacob Weisdorf, University of Southern Denmark. Jane Humphries, University of Oxford Historical estimates of workers’ earnings suffer from the fundamental problem that annual incomes are inferred from day wages without knowing the length of the working year. This uncertainty raises doubts about core growth theories that rely on […]

Federico Tadei is Profesor Visitanteat Universitat de Barcelona Extractive colonial institutions have been considered one of the main causes of current African underdevelopment (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2001; Nunn, 2007). Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify and its precise mechanisms are not well understood, a paucity of research has examined exactly how successful […]

Thilo Albers is PhD student in Economic Historyat London School of Economics (LSE) How forceful can retaliations to alleged currency manipulations be? What are the effects on trade? The following research seeks answers to these questions in the interwar period. The evidence for China still deliberately undervaluing her currency is at best weak (see Cheung […]

Did events during the First World War reflect in the foreign exchange rates? A new  EHES working paper by Avni Önder Hanedar, Hatice Gaye Gencer, Sercan Demiralay, and İsmail Altay from different universities in Turkey provide evidence on the foreign exchange trading at the Istanbul bourse of the Ottoman Empire to shed light on this […]

The lasting effects of the 1629-30 epidemic on the Italian cities Guido Alfani isassociate professor atBocconi University After many years of relative neglect, plague has recently started to recover a long-lost popularity among economic historians. In particular, the Black Death pandemic of the fourteenth century has been singled out as a possible factor favouring Europe over […]