New EHES working paper The family trees of European nobility provide a rich resource for the understanding of our Neil Cummins is Assistant Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics demographic past. Over the past year, I have consolidated about 1.3 million aristocratic records that have been deposited online by the church of Jesus Christ […]
Paving the way to modernity: Prussian roads and grain market integration in Westphalia, 1821-1855
New EHES working paper Europe in the early nineteenth century has seen enormous changes: Borders were redrawn at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, economic liberalism took hold in Britain and the continent alike, urbanisation grew and industrialisation began to change the standard of living and the environment, to speak of just a […]
Mismeasuring Long Run Growth. The Bias from Spliced National Accounts
Leandro Prados de la Escosurais Professor in Economic History atUniversidad Carlos III de Madrid Last April it was made public that Nigeria’s GDP figures for 2013 had been revised upwards by 89 per cent, as the base year for its calculation was brought forward from 1990 to 2010 (Financial Times April 7, 2014). As a result, […]
The Drivers of Long-run CO2 Emissions: A Global Perspective since 1800
New EHES working paper Climate change is regarded by many as the greatest environmental challenge faced by present and future generations. While public awareness and climate policy are recent developments, mankind’s activity has been contributing to the rise in CO2 emissions for more than two centuries. New research by Sofia Teives Henriques and Karol J. […]
State dissolution, sovereign debt and default: Lessons from the UK and Ireland, 1920-1938
New EHES working paper How do financial markets react to the dissolution of a sovereign state? Do dissolutions lead to sovereign defaults? Events in Scotland, Spain and the Ukraine underscore the importance of these questions. In the absence of recent case studies, historical studies can provide insight. A new EHES working paper studies the breakup […]
New EHES working paper
Fertility and early-life mortality. Evidence from smallpox vaccination in Sweden What is the causal effect of early-life mortality on fertility? Recent research by Philipp Ager, Casper W. Hansen and Peter S. Jensen sheds new light on this question by testing how the introduction of vaccination in Sweden at the end of 1801 affected early life […]
New EHES Working Paper
The Danish Agricultural Revolution in an Energy Perspective: A Case of Development with Few Domestic Energy Sources Is a lack of domestic energy resources necessarily a limiting factor to growth, as suggested for example by the work of Robert C. Allen? A new EHES Working Paper argues that this does not have to be the […]
New EHES Working paper
Breaking the Unbreakable Union: Nationalism, Trade Disintegration and the Soviet Economic Collapse Why did the Soviet economy collapse so quickly in the late 1980s and early 1990s? A new EHES Working Paper argues that the reason can partly be found in the reemergence of nationalism to the territorial fringes of the Union. Leaders from Ukraine, […]
New EHES Working paper:
Just Add Milk: A Productivity Analysis of the Revolutionary Changes in Nineteenth Century Danish Dairying “Cows on Saltholm” (Theodor Philippsen, 1892), Danish National Gallery What is it that makes agricultural producers more productive? In this paper, Markus Lampe and Paul Sharp examine the Danish agricultural revolution, a period when first large and then small farmers caught up quickly with […]
Economic Liberty in the Long Run: Evidence from OECD Countries
Leandro Prados de la Escosura is professor in Economic history at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. How has freedom evolved over time? A distinction has been made between ‘negative’ freedom, defined as lack of interference or coercion by others (freedom from), and ‘positive’ freedom, that is, the guarantee of access to markets that allow people […]