Jacob Weisdorf
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 976931 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jacob Weisdorf |
| PRENOMES | Jacob |
| SOBRENOME | Weisdorf |
| ASSINATURA | WEISDORF J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4434-115X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 248 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The geographical origins of the wealth of regions
Gender inequality in urban British Africa
We examine the colonial origins and evolution of gender inequality in mission schooling and formal labour force participation across six cities in British colonial Africa, using marriage register data for some 30,000 Anglican brides and grooms well‐positioned to benefit from colonial educational and employment opportunities. The spouses’ signature literacy and occupational statistics reveal growing gender gaps during the early colonial period, bo…
Forgotten Family
E. A. Wrigley identified the responsiveness of nuptiality and marital fertility to changes in male wages. Others have theorized the importance of women's decision-making in the timing of marriage, but without much empirical evidence. Combining new long-run series of annual wages for men, for married and single women, and for children with existing demographic data, the influence of women and children's remuneration on household formation is inves…
Beyond the male breadwinner
This article provides a novel framework within which to evaluate real household incomes of predominantly rural working families of various sizes and structures in England in the years 1260-1850. We reject ahistorical assumptions about complete reliance on men's wages and male breadwinning, moving closer to reality by including women and children's contributions to family incomes. Our empirical strategy benefits from recent estimates of men's annu…
Italy and the little divergence in wages and prices
This article presents an early modern wage index for stable rural male workers in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. These wages highlight the importance of distinguishing between locations and contract types when considering historical workers' living standards, and they speak to a longstanding debate about whether Italy's early modern downturn was purely an urban phenomenon, or an all-embracing one. Our data lend support to the former view, since we d…
Family Standards of Living Over the Long Run, England 1280-1850
This article uses new wage series for men, women and children in combination with an established cost of living index and standard assumptions about family size to construct a measure of family welfare in England, 1280-1850. It asks whether this family could achieve a standard of living historically defined as 'respectable'. It extracts information from primary and secondary sources to make adjustments for the participation rates of women and chi…
Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices
We present new wage indices for skilled and unskilled construction workers in Italy. Our data avoid multiple issues pestering earlier wages, making our new indices the first consistent ones for early-modern Italy. Our improved wages, obtained from the St. Peter's Church in Rome, consolidate the view that urban Italy began a prolonged downturn during the seventeenth century. They also offer sustenance to the idea that epidemics instigated the decl…
Further Evidence of Within-Marriage Fertility Control in Pre-Transitional England
The identification of parity effects on the hazard of a next birth in cross-family data requires accounting for heterogeneity in fecundity across couples. In a previously published article, Cinnirella et al. Demography, 54, 413–436 (2017), we stratified duration models at the maternal level for this purpose and found that the hazard of a next birth decreases with rising parity in historical England. Clark and Cummins Demography, 56 (2019) took is…
Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850
Estimates of historical workers’ annual incomes suffer from the fundamental problem that they are inferred from day wage rates without knowing how many days of work day-labourers undertook per year. We circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day. Our data suggest that earlier annual income estimates based on day wages overestimate medieval labour incomes but…
Fecundity, Fertility and The Formation of Human Capital
Exploiting a genealogy of English individuals living in the 16th to the 19th centuries, this study shows that lower parental reproductive capacity positively affected the socio-economic achievements of offspring. Using the time interval between the date of marriage and the first birth as a measure of reproductive capacity, we find that parental fecundity positively affected the number of siblings and that children of parents with lower fecundity …
The Blessings of Medicine? Patient Characteristics and Health Outcomes in a Ugandan Mission Hospital, 1908–19701
This article sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda’s earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A data set of 18,600 admissions permits analysis of patients’ age, sex, residence, religion, diagnoses, duration of hospitalisation and treatment outcomes. We document Tor…
Social mobility among Christian Africans
This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investigate long-term trends and determinants of intergenerational social mobility and colonial elite formation among Christian African men. It shows that the colonial era opened up new labour opportunities for these African converts, enabling them to take large steps up the social ladder regardless of their social origin. Contrary to the widespread belief tha…
Human capital formation from occupations
Malthus in the Bedroom
We use duration models on a well-known historical data set of more than 15,000 families and 60,000 births in England for the period 1540–1850 to show that the sampled families adjusted the timing of their births in accordance with the economic conditions as well as their stock of dependent children. The effects were larger among the lower socioeconomic ranks. Our findings on the existence of parity-dependent as well as parity-independent birth sp…
A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895-2011
The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rap…
The Wages of Women in England, 1260-1850
This paper presents two wage-series for unskilled English women workers 1260-1850, one based on daily wages and one on the daily remuneration implied in annual contracts. The series are compared with each other and with evidence for men, informing several debates. Our findings suggest first that women servants did not share the post-Black Death "golden age" and so offer little support for a "girl-powered" economic breakthrough; and second that du…
Globalization revisited
French revolution or industrial revolution? A note on the contrasting experiences of England and France up to 1800
At the end of the eighteenth century, England and France both underwent revolutions: France the French Revolution, England the industrial revolution. This note sheds new light on these contrasting experiences in the histories of England and France by looking at the evolution of real consumer prices in London and Paris in the centuries leading up to 1800. Whilst in London, building workers were facing low and stable consumer prices over the period…
Citation success
The determinants of income in a Malthusian equilibrium
Ranking economic history journals
The Neolithic Revolution from a price-theoretic perspective
Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300-1830
It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket …
From preventive to permissive checks
Made for Toil
Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300-1830
It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket …
Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850
Estimates of historical workers’ annual incomes suffer from the fundamental problem that they are inferred from day wage rates without knowing how many days of work day-labourers undertook per year. We circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day. Our data suggest that earlier annual income estimates based on day wages overestimate medieval labour incomes but…
The Wages of Women in England, 1260-1850
This paper presents two wage-series for unskilled English women workers 1260-1850, one based on daily wages and one on the daily remuneration implied in annual contracts. The series are compared with each other and with evidence for men, informing several debates. Our findings suggest first that women servants did not share the post-Black Death "golden age" and so offer little support for a "girl-powered" economic breakthrough; and second that du…
From Foraging To Farming
This article reviews the main theories about the prehistoric shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The transition, also known as the Neolithic Revolution, was ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization by creating the foundation for the later process of industrialization and sustained economic growth. The article provides a brief historical survey of the leading hypotheses concerning the rise of agriculture proposed in the…
Malthus in the Bedroom
We use duration models on a well-known historical data set of more than 15,000 families and 60,000 births in England for the period 1540–1850 to show that the sampled families adjusted the timing of their births in accordance with the economic conditions as well as their stock of dependent children. The effects were larger among the lower socioeconomic ranks. Our findings on the existence of parity-dependent as well as parity-independent birth sp…
Beyond the male breadwinner
This article provides a novel framework within which to evaluate real household incomes of predominantly rural working families of various sizes and structures in England in the years 1260-1850. We reject ahistorical assumptions about complete reliance on men's wages and male breadwinning, moving closer to reality by including women and children's contributions to family incomes. Our empirical strategy benefits from recent estimates of men's annu…
The Blessings of Medicine? Patient Characteristics and Health Outcomes in a Ugandan Mission Hospital, 1908–19701
This article sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda’s earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A data set of 18,600 admissions permits analysis of patients’ age, sex, residence, religion, diagnoses, duration of hospitalisation and treatment outcomes. We document Tor…
Globalization revisited
Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices
We present new wage indices for skilled and unskilled construction workers in Italy. Our data avoid multiple issues pestering earlier wages, making our new indices the first consistent ones for early-modern Italy. Our improved wages, obtained from the St. Peter's Church in Rome, consolidate the view that urban Italy began a prolonged downturn during the seventeenth century. They also offer sustenance to the idea that epidemics instigated the decl…
A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895-2011
The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rap…
Italy and the little divergence in wages and prices
This article presents an early modern wage index for stable rural male workers in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. These wages highlight the importance of distinguishing between locations and contract types when considering historical workers' living standards, and they speak to a longstanding debate about whether Italy's early modern downturn was purely an urban phenomenon, or an all-embracing one. Our data lend support to the former view, since we d…
Fecundity, Fertility and The Formation of Human Capital
Exploiting a genealogy of English individuals living in the 16th to the 19th centuries, this study shows that lower parental reproductive capacity positively affected the socio-economic achievements of offspring. Using the time interval between the date of marriage and the first birth as a measure of reproductive capacity, we find that parental fecundity positively affected the number of siblings and that children of parents with lower fecundity …
Family Standards of Living Over the Long Run, England 1280-1850
This article uses new wage series for men, women and children in combination with an established cost of living index and standard assumptions about family size to construct a measure of family welfare in England, 1280-1850. It asks whether this family could achieve a standard of living historically defined as 'respectable'. It extracts information from primary and secondary sources to make adjustments for the participation rates of women and chi…
Further Evidence of Within-Marriage Fertility Control in Pre-Transitional England
The identification of parity effects on the hazard of a next birth in cross-family data requires accounting for heterogeneity in fecundity across couples. In a previously published article, Cinnirella et al. Demography, 54, 413–436 (2017), we stratified duration models at the maternal level for this purpose and found that the hazard of a next birth decreases with rising parity in historical England. Clark and Cummins Demography, 56 (2019) took is…
Citation success
The determinants of income in a Malthusian equilibrium
From stagnation to growth
Social mobility among Christian Africans
This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investigate long-term trends and determinants of intergenerational social mobility and colonial elite formation among Christian African men. It shows that the colonial era opened up new labour opportunities for these African converts, enabling them to take large steps up the social ladder regardless of their social origin. Contrary to the widespread belief tha…
Made for Toil
From stagnation to growth
From Foraging To Farming
This article reviews the main theories about the prehistoric shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The transition, also known as the Neolithic Revolution, was ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization by creating the foundation for the later process of industrialization and sustained economic growth. The article provides a brief historical survey of the leading hypotheses concerning the rise of agriculture proposed in the…
Made for Toil
From preventive to permissive checks
Ranking economic history journals
The Neolithic Revolution from a price-theoretic perspective
Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300-1830
It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket …
The determinants of income in a Malthusian equilibrium
French revolution or industrial revolution? A note on the contrasting experiences of England and France up to 1800
At the end of the eighteenth century, England and France both underwent revolutions: France the French Revolution, England the industrial revolution. This note sheds new light on these contrasting experiences in the histories of England and France by looking at the evolution of real consumer prices in London and Paris in the centuries leading up to 1800. Whilst in London, building workers were facing low and stable consumer prices over the period…
Citation success
Globalization revisited
The Wages of Women in England, 1260-1850
This paper presents two wage-series for unskilled English women workers 1260-1850, one based on daily wages and one on the daily remuneration implied in annual contracts. The series are compared with each other and with evidence for men, informing several debates. Our findings suggest first that women servants did not share the post-Black Death "golden age" and so offer little support for a "girl-powered" economic breakthrough; and second that du…
A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895-2011
The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rap…
Human capital formation from occupations
Malthus in the Bedroom
We use duration models on a well-known historical data set of more than 15,000 families and 60,000 births in England for the period 1540–1850 to show that the sampled families adjusted the timing of their births in accordance with the economic conditions as well as their stock of dependent children. The effects were larger among the lower socioeconomic ranks. Our findings on the existence of parity-dependent as well as parity-independent birth sp…
Social mobility among Christian Africans
This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investigate long-term trends and determinants of intergenerational social mobility and colonial elite formation among Christian African men. It shows that the colonial era opened up new labour opportunities for these African converts, enabling them to take large steps up the social ladder regardless of their social origin. Contrary to the widespread belief tha…
Further Evidence of Within-Marriage Fertility Control in Pre-Transitional England
The identification of parity effects on the hazard of a next birth in cross-family data requires accounting for heterogeneity in fecundity across couples. In a previously published article, Cinnirella et al. Demography, 54, 413–436 (2017), we stratified duration models at the maternal level for this purpose and found that the hazard of a next birth decreases with rising parity in historical England. Clark and Cummins Demography, 56 (2019) took is…
Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850
Estimates of historical workers’ annual incomes suffer from the fundamental problem that they are inferred from day wage rates without knowing how many days of work day-labourers undertook per year. We circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day. Our data suggest that earlier annual income estimates based on day wages overestimate medieval labour incomes but…
Fecundity, Fertility and The Formation of Human Capital
Exploiting a genealogy of English individuals living in the 16th to the 19th centuries, this study shows that lower parental reproductive capacity positively affected the socio-economic achievements of offspring. Using the time interval between the date of marriage and the first birth as a measure of reproductive capacity, we find that parental fecundity positively affected the number of siblings and that children of parents with lower fecundity …
The Blessings of Medicine? Patient Characteristics and Health Outcomes in a Ugandan Mission Hospital, 1908–19701
This article sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda’s earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A data set of 18,600 admissions permits analysis of patients’ age, sex, residence, religion, diagnoses, duration of hospitalisation and treatment outcomes. We document Tor…
Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices
We present new wage indices for skilled and unskilled construction workers in Italy. Our data avoid multiple issues pestering earlier wages, making our new indices the first consistent ones for early-modern Italy. Our improved wages, obtained from the St. Peter's Church in Rome, consolidate the view that urban Italy began a prolonged downturn during the seventeenth century. They also offer sustenance to the idea that epidemics instigated the decl…
Italy and the little divergence in wages and prices
This article presents an early modern wage index for stable rural male workers in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. These wages highlight the importance of distinguishing between locations and contract types when considering historical workers' living standards, and they speak to a longstanding debate about whether Italy's early modern downturn was purely an urban phenomenon, or an all-embracing one. Our data lend support to the former view, since we d…
Family Standards of Living Over the Long Run, England 1280-1850
This article uses new wage series for men, women and children in combination with an established cost of living index and standard assumptions about family size to construct a measure of family welfare in England, 1280-1850. It asks whether this family could achieve a standard of living historically defined as 'respectable'. It extracts information from primary and secondary sources to make adjustments for the participation rates of women and chi…
Beyond the male breadwinner
This article provides a novel framework within which to evaluate real household incomes of predominantly rural working families of various sizes and structures in England in the years 1260-1850. We reject ahistorical assumptions about complete reliance on men's wages and male breadwinning, moving closer to reality by including women and children's contributions to family incomes. Our empirical strategy benefits from recent estimates of men's annu…
Forgotten Family
E. A. Wrigley identified the responsiveness of nuptiality and marital fertility to changes in male wages. Others have theorized the importance of women's decision-making in the timing of marriage, but without much empirical evidence. Combining new long-run series of annual wages for men, for married and single women, and for children with existing demographic data, the influence of women and children's remuneration on household formation is inves…
Economics (22 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (18 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Demographic economics (12 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Labour economics (9 obras) · Geography (8 obras) · Market economy (8 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (7 obras)