- Netherlands
- Ancient Greek History, Numismatics, Ancient numismatics (Archaeology), Hellenistic History, Ancient economies (Archaeology), GDP, and 6 moreLabour Economics: flexible working practices; job satisfaction; employee and company performance; training and promotion linkages; labour market trends., Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor, Alexander the Great, Ancient Greek Numismatics, Monetary history, and Ancient economyedit
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In recent years, interest in the welfare levels of ancient economies has increased considerably, partly in a quest to find the origins of present-day income differences. A popular method for calculating income differences is the use of... more
In recent years, interest in the welfare levels of ancient economies has increased considerably, partly in a quest to find the origins of present-day income differences. A popular method for calculating income differences is the use of subsistence ratios that indicate whether the wage of an unskilled male labourer is sufficient to purchase enough products and services to maintain his family. In this paper, we present new estimates for the southeastern part of Han China and modify existing estimates for the eastern half of the Roman Empire (Egypt and Syria) and Babylonia to make them comparable. We find that the agricultural regions of Egypt and Babylonia experienced substantially lower subsistence ratios than Syria and southeastern Han China. We find that the main reason for the difference was that unskilled male workers belonged to the higher income brackets in southeastern Han China and Syria. This finding can be explained by the small group of free wage workers in these societies...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Despite the existence of a rich literature on Chinese partial household division, there is still limited evidence of its effect on land and capital accumulation and well‐being. In this study, contrary to the dominant view, we find that... more
Despite the existence of a rich literature on Chinese partial household division, there is still limited evidence of its effect on land and capital accumulation and well‐being. In this study, contrary to the dominant view, we find that household property size peaked around 1800s–1830s, suggesting that equal‐share system did not necessarily lead to land fragmentation. We find evidence that this rise in farm sizes is related to the opposing forces of increased well‐being and increased inequality.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This is a definitive new account of Britain's economic evolution from a backwater of Europe in 1270 to the hub of the global economy in 1870. A team of leading economic historians reconstruct Britain's national accounts for the... more
This is a definitive new account of Britain's economic evolution from a backwater of Europe in 1270 to the hub of the global economy in 1870. A team of leading economic historians reconstruct Britain's national accounts for the first time right back into the thirteenth century to show what really happened quantitatively during the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to traditional views of the earlier period as one of Malthusian stagnation, they reveal how the transition to modern economic growth built on the earlier foundations of a persistent upward trend in GDP per capita which doubled between 1270 and 1700. Featuring comprehensive estimates of population, land use, agricultural production, industrial and service-sector production and GDP per capita, as well as analysis of their implications, this will be an essential reference for anyone interested in British economic history and the origins of modern economic growth more generally.
Research Interests:
A gap in the census surveys for England and Wales between 1921 and 1951 hinders the analysis of their labour structure for the interwar years. The present article uses a dataset containing occupational titles from the National Register –... more
A gap in the census surveys for England and Wales between 1921 and 1951 hinders the analysis of their labour structure for the interwar years. The present article uses a dataset containing occupational titles from the National Register – a census-like enumeration of 1939, recently digitised by the genealogy service ‘Find My Past’ – which was previously assigned numerical codes (the pst system). The study expands the existing data analysis on the occupational structure of England and Wales by introducing three further variables: the gender of the surveyed individuals, their age, and the shares of the inactive population per gender and age groups.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The introduction of coinage in Asia Minor and the Greek World The introduction of coinage in the Near East by Alexander the Great The introduction of coinage in China The role of trust
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
... written as 1 Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy, p. 84 2 Van der Spek, Palace, Temple and Market, p. 322. ... Autumn 139 - Seleucid successes - Parthia vs. ... Summer 138 Decisive battleSeleucids vs Parthia 99 > 115 > 111... more
... written as 1 Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy, p. 84 2 Van der Spek, Palace, Temple and Market, p. 322. ... Autumn 139 - Seleucid successes - Parthia vs. ... Summer 138 Decisive battleSeleucids vs Parthia 99 > 115 > 111 > 115 25 > 26 19 > 15 463 695 > 877 ...
Research Interests:
The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of both human and physical capital in economic growth in Hungary during the 20th century by extending the already available data on physical and human capital. Besides the standard... more
The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of both human and physical capital in economic growth in Hungary during the 20th century by extending the already available data on physical and human capital. Besides the standard measure for the volume of human capital, we develop a simple method to estimate the value of the human capital stock in Hungary between 1924 and 2006. While the volume index slowly grows over time, the value of human capital shows a decline during the late socialist period. Applying the value of human capital in a growth accounting analysis, we find that the Solow residual has no long-run effect on economic growth anymore.
Research Interests:
The aim of this project is to analyse the economic development of Holland in the early modern period on the basis of a reconstruction of its national accounts. It has been one of the first times the system of national accounts is applied... more
The aim of this project is to analyse the economic development of Holland in the early modern period on the basis of a reconstruction of its national accounts. It has been one of the first times the system of national accounts is applied to the study of a pre-industrial economy. The project is confined to the province of Holland, which was demographically and economically the most important part of the Northern Netherlands during this period. Our main method is to gather specific information on annual output and added value in each of the most important economic branches, following the System of National Accounts (SNA) used in contemporary economic-statistical research. The starting point is the production approach; the branches that are being reconstructed include agriculture, herring fisheries, peat extraction, production of textiles, sugar and paper, to name but a few. Weights will be derived from a reconstruction of the structure of the labour force in three moments in time: 151...
Since colonial times, substantial regional income disparities have been reported for Indonesia. However, in spite of a wide variety of available data and indicators, so far published data on Indonesian per capita GDP in colonial times are... more
Since colonial times, substantial regional income disparities have been reported for Indonesia. However, in spite of a wide variety of available data and indicators, so far published data on Indonesian per capita GDP in colonial times are limited to macro-estimates for the entire archipelago or are confined either to Java or to the Outer Islands. In this paper we provide a first attempt to arrive at estimates of diverging income and living standards at a regional level. We implement the Geary and Stark method on a large body of data collected by the colonial government, to estimate GDP for ten macro-regions and five benchmark years between 1870 and 1930. Our findings, corrected for prices, confirm the image arising from the existing literature of major divergences within the Indonesian archipelago in general, and of a higher per capita GDP in most of the Outer Islands (all islands of the Indonesian archipelago except for Java and Madura) compared with Java in particular. This was de...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The aim of this paper is to present a new dataset of global inequality between 1820 and the present, based on the available historical evidence, and to tentatively analyse some of the results that emerge from these data. The importance of... more
The aim of this paper is to present a new dataset of global inequality between 1820 and the present, based on the available historical evidence, and to tentatively analyse some of the results that emerge from these data. The importance of the subject hardly needs to be stressed: the enormous increase of inequality on a global scale is one of the most
Research Interests:
Was the height difference between West Africans and Europeans that exists today already visible at the end of the Atlantic slave trade? We present the first study of changing heights for people born in West Africa during the early 19 th... more
Was the height difference between West Africans and Europeans that exists today already visible at the end of the Atlantic slave trade? We present the first study of changing heights for people born in West Africa during the early 19 th century. The data set, not used before for anthropometry, documents men, born between 1800 and 1849 in what are now Ghana and Burkina Faso. Mostly purchased from slave owners, they were recruited into the Dutch army to serve in the Netherlands Indies. We find that height development was stagnant between 1800 and 1830 and deteriorated strongly during the 1840s. In international comparison and after taking selectivity issues into account, these West Africans were notably shorter than northwestern Europeans but not much shorter than Southern Europeans during this period. Acknowledgements We thank Alexander Moradi and members of the Tuebingen and Utrecht economic history research groups for important comments. Toufika Darrazi helped to collect the data s...
To date, the rise and fall of the (former) USSR has triggered a lot of research. Many have focused on the accumulation of physical capital, growth, and consumption. Recently, also the accumulation of human capital has increasingly been... more
To date, the rise and fall of the (former) USSR has triggered a lot of research. Many have focused on the accumulation of physical capital, growth, and consumption. Recently, also the accumulation of human capital has increasingly been incorporated in this picture. However, few datasets exist that cover this crucial variable for this vast area. Therefore, our main objective is to introduce a new dataset that contains human capital related time series for the USSR (and the Newly Independent States (NIS) after its dissolution), constructed mostly on an annual basis. These data were drawn from various primary sources, available datasets and secondary literature where our focus was on constructing a dataset as clear, transparent and consistent as possible. It is our hope that, by supplying these data in electronic format, it will significantly advance quantitative economic history research on Russia and all over the former Soviet Union area (FSU) and will inspire further research in var...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The role of money (and in many ancient economies this is equated with silver) has fascinated people throughout the ages. There has been a lively debate on the role of (coined and uncoined) silver as money in the Antiquity. We shall not... more
The role of money (and in many ancient economies this is equated with silver) has fascinated people throughout the ages. There has been a lively debate on the role of (coined and uncoined) silver as money in the Antiquity. We shall not enter into this debate, but it is our contention (following Jursa (2010)) that silver was used as money (means of payment, means of account) already in the Ancient Near East and that silver remained the main form of money until the nineteenth century. The lack of direct evidence on the amount of silver in circulation, however, puts a serious limitation for historical research on the monetary development in ancient societies. In this paper we attempt to remedy this by applying a model to available staple price data from first millennium BC Babylonia to estimate the changes of the amount of silver in the economy. In order to do this, in section 2 we introduce a model that establishes a relationship between prices and the quantity of silver in circulation. This establishes the relation between the price level of a staple crop and the growth of the amount of silver in the economy. In section 3, using our model, we calculate the amount of silver in circulation. We find that this decreases considerably, which possibly explains the rise in purchasing power of silver observed in the second century BC. In section 4 we cross-check our model by applying it to medieval and early modern England. We find that our estimates of silver in circulation are close to the independent estimates that exist in the literature. Remarkably, we also find that the influx of Spanish silver in England in the sixteenth century was not as large as is often assumed.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In this paper, we trace the causes of regional industrial development in the nineteenth century Low Countries by disentangling the complex relationship between industrialisation, technological progress and human capital formation. We use... more
In this paper, we trace the causes of regional industrial development in the nineteenth century Low Countries by disentangling the complex relationship between industrialisation, technological progress and human capital formation. We use sectoral differences in the application of technology and human capital as the central elements to explain the rise in employment in the manufacturing sector during the nineteenth century, and our findings suggest a re-interpretation of the deskilling debate. To account for differences among manufacturing sectors, we use population and industrial census data, subdivided according to their present-day manufacturing sector equivalents of the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC). Instrumental variable regression analysis revealed that employment in the manufacturing sector was influenced by so-called upper- tail knowledge and not by average educational levels, providing empirical proof of a so-called deskilling industrialisation proc...
Research Interests:
In recent decades, scholarly attention has been drawn to spatial differences, particularly with regard to the role of urban centres as cores of educational development and modernisation. However, study on the sub-parts of this topic has... more
In recent decades, scholarly attention has been drawn to spatial differences, particularly with regard to the role of urban centres as cores of educational development and modernisation. However, study on the sub-parts of this topic has proceeded more or less in isolation, in the various academic disciplines of consumer theory, political science, sociology and history. In the case of China, fragmentation of this topic has been aggravated by governmental policies, which have added an additional dimension to the relationship between urbanisation and education. In this chapter, we make a start in combining the various disciplines by systematically discussing the relation between urbanisation and education in multiple political periods. Our findings are, first, that academic fragmentation has persisted over time, with the exception of the 1949–1978 period when research was dominated by political scientists. Second, in terms of both the definition of urbanisation and the topics of resear...
Research Interests: China and Urbanization
In this paper, we tried to address the issue how education affect economic welfare. We find that in the long-run neither education nor physical capital affects per capita income growth. This seems to suggest that it were inspiration (i.e.... more
In this paper, we tried to address the issue how education affect economic welfare. We find that in the long-run neither education nor physical capital affects per capita income growth. This seems to suggest that it were inspiration (i.e. TFP) rather than perspiration (i.e. education and physical capital) factors that drove economic development. However, TFP growth can be subdivided in the growth of general productivity (i.e. a productivity frontier that indicates the maximum possible productivity per capita), and technical efficiency (i.e. how efficient education and physical capital are [how far they are from the technical frontier]). We find that education does have a positive effect on technical efficiency (whereas physical capital has a negative effect) implying that education is necessary to adopt skill biased technology in the productive process. This leads to a small, but significant, effect of education on TFP growth. Yet, it remains clear that it is largely productivity gr...
Research Interests:
An introduction to the topic of the book. Attention is paid to the origins of money, the role of trust and monetary institutions.
Research Interests: History, Ancient History, Modern History, Economic History, Economics, and 15 moreMonetary Economics, Medieval History, Early Modern History, Assyriology, Hellenistic History, Numismatics, Money and Banking, China, Ancient Near East, Money, Monetary Policy, Roman Provincial Coinage, Neo-Babylonian period, Hellenistic Babylonia, and Medieval Coinage
This exciting new volume examines the development of market performance from Antiquity until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Efficient market structures are agreed by most economists to serve as evidence of economic prosperity,... more
This exciting new volume examines the development of market performance from Antiquity until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Efficient market structures are agreed by most economists to serve as evidence of economic prosperity, and to be prerequisites for further economic growth. However, this is the first study to examine market performance as a whole, over such a large time period. Presenting a hitherto unknown and inaccessible corpus of data from ancient Babylonia, this international set of contributors are for the first time able to offer an in-depth study of market performance over a period of 2,500 years.
The contributions focus on the market of staple crops, as they were crucial goods in these societies. Over this entire period, all papers provide a similar conceptual and methodological framework resting on a common definition of market performance combined with qualitative and quantitative analyses resting on new and improved price data. In this way, the book is able to combine analysis of the Babylonian period with similar work on the Roman, Early-and Late Medieval and Early Modern period.
Bringing together input from assyriologists, ancient historians, economic historians and economists, this volume will be crucial reading for all those with an interest in ancient history, economic history and economics.
This is part of a research project conducted at the VU University (Vrije Universiteit) Amsterdam, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) on "The efficiency of markets in Pre-Industrial Societies: the case of Babylonia, 485-61 BC".
Efficient market structures are agreed by most economists to serve as evidence of economic prosperity, and to be prerequisites for further economic growth. However, this is the first study to examine market performance as a whole, over such a large time period. Presenting a hitherto unknown and inaccessible corpus of data from ancient Babylonia, this international set of contributors are for the first time able to offer an in-depth study of market performance over a period of 2,500 years.
The contributions focus on the market of staple crops, as they were crucial goods in these societies. Over this entire period, all papers provide a similar conceptual and methodological framework resting on a common definition of market performance combined with qualitative and quantitative analyses resting on new and improved price data. In this way, the book is able to combine analysis of the Babylonian period with similar work on the Roman, Early-and Late Medieval and Early Modern period.
Bringing together input from assyriologists, ancient historians, economic historians and economists, this volume will be crucial reading for all those with an interest in ancient history, economic history and economics.
This is part of a research project conducted at the VU University (Vrije Universiteit) Amsterdam, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) on "The efficiency of markets in Pre-Industrial Societies: the case of Babylonia, 485-61 BC".
Research Interests: Ancient History, Economic History, Economic Sociology, Egyptology, Economics, and 90 moreDevelopment Economics, International Economics, Monetary Economics, Econometrics, Financial Economics, Political Economy, Roman History, Statistics, Near Eastern Studies, Multivariate Statistics, Medieval History, Financial Econometrics, Papyrology, Early Modern History, History of Economic Thought, Assyriology, Middle East Studies, Chinese Studies, Middle East History, International Trade, Hellenistic History, Applied Econometrics, Applied Statistics, Computational Statistics, Economic Growth, Liberalism, International Political Economy, Numismatics, Agricultural Economics, Ancient economies (Archaeology), Karl Polanyi, Egyptian History, Time series Econometrics, Irish History, Economic Development, China, Monetary history, Market Research, China Going Global, Behavioral Economics, Modern Chinese History, History of the Mediterranean, Early Modern Italy, Ancient Near East, Ancient numismatics (Archaeology), Graeco-Roman Egypt, Ptolemaic Egyptian History, Adam Smith, Roman Economy, Contemporary China, Chinese history (History), Money, Ancient Greek Numismatics, Ancient Roman Numismatics, Seleucid Empire, Trade, Ancient Trade & Commerce (Archaeology), Archaeology of Mediterranean Trade, Ancient Egyptian History, Achaemenid History, Ancient economy, Bayesian statistics & modelling, Roman coins, Ancient Near Eastern History, Economy, Monetary Policy, Roman Provincial Coinage, Economia, Coin Hoards, Ancient Near Eastern Economy, Hellenistic Babylonia, Ancient Coins, Parthian Empire, Silver, Middle Ages, Ancient economies, Ancient economic history, Ancient Mesopotamian Economics/politics, Ancient Roman economy, trade and commerce, Statistics, Econometrics, Economics, Marketing searching and adjusting, Management methods, Demography, Projects with foreign financing, Price universe and interpret indices, Physics, Econophysics., Coins, Econometría, Phoenician trade, Ancient Egyptian Economy, Political Economy and History, Ancient Greek Economy, Ancient Near Eastern social and economic history, Roman Archaeology, Socio economy of Ancient Mesopotamia, and Ancient Economic Theories
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In order to study the location patterns of manufacturing firms, and particularly the tendency for industry sectors to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localization. In order to treat space as... more
In order to study the location patterns of manufacturing firms, and particularly the tendency for industry sectors to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localization. In order to treat space as continuous rather than using an arbitrary collection of geographical units, we follow the point-pattern methodology of Duranton and Overman (2005, 2008). We apply these techniques on two datasets of Dutch manufacturing firms in two benchmark years, to explore the differences of co-location over time. On the one hand, we will use a dataset of the larger manufacturing establishments in the Netherlands in 1896 and 2010. On the other hand, we will make use of a standardized factory-level dataset in Hunan province, China. Presenting thus two cross sections from two completely different regions, we aim to provide a first empirical test of the agglomeration theories of Marshall (1890) in his period of research and repeat these tests for the recent period.