We assess the effects of a major land-policy change on farm size and agricultural productivity using a quantitative model and micro-level data. We study the 1988 land reform in the Philippines that imposed a ceiling on land holdings and severely restricted the transferability of the...

We assess the effects of a major land-policy change on farm size and agricultural productivity using a quantitative model and micro-level data. We study the 1988 land reform in the Philippines that imposed a ceiling on land holdings and severely restricted the transferability of the...

Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called 'Golden Age of the Labourer', is the very troubling issue of 'wage-stickiness'. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed 'Golden Age' of rising...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the 'draperies' or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic League as the...

This paper is a necessary companion to the one entitled The West European Woollen Industries and their Struggles for International Markets, c.1000 - 1500. No one can properly comprehend that five-century history of international competition for textile markets, without some basic understanding...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the �draperies� or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German...

The traditional and almost universal method of expressing real wages is by index numbers, according to the formula: RWI = NWI/CPI: i.e., the real wage is the quotient of the nominal (money) wage index divided by the consumer price index, all employing a common base period (here: 1451-75 = 100)....

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs,...

The precocious economic development, extensive urbanisation, and wealth of medieval Flanders was based largely upon producing and exporting a wide range of essentially wool-based textiles, from cheap mass consumption products (the coarse and light says, biffes, etc.) to extremely expensive and...

This paper explores the impact of the Count of Flanders' monetary and wage policies upon the fortunes of the Flemish woollen cloth industry in a crucial but penultimate phase of its irredeemable decline, from 1390 to 1435, when it was beginning to yield to the growing supremacy of the now...