I am proud to announce that my book "As Gods Among Men. A History of the Rich in the West" has been awarded the Ranki Biennial Prize by the Economic History Association!😊👇

Now on Early View: 'Wealth inequality and epidemics in the Republic of Venice (1400–1800)'. By Guido Alfani, Matteo Di Tullio & Mattia Fochesato. @guidoalfani.bsky.social‬ ‪@stone-lis.bsky.social‬ @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Why was the Irish Famine was so severe? Why did the North and South develop differently? Is Ireland ‘rich’? If you want to find out, CEPH is pleased to announce that registration is open for our online course, "The Development of the Irish Economy". Register here: ceph.ie/the-developm...

I'm excited to launch a YouTube channel about econometrics and practical coding / productivity tools. Please consider subscribing so that others can more easily find these resources! www.youtube.com/@structurale...

My interview on The Visible Hand podcast is now live! www.thevisiblehand.uk/episodes/epi...

Whoa! Elsevier fired @richardtol.bsky.social, longstanding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Energy Economics. Richard's side of the story should be ringing alarm bells. #EconSky Fraud and cover-up richardtol.substack.com/p/fraud-and-...

Come and check out our next Formal Demography Working Group meeting with @phbocquier.bsky.social ! Sign up on our website to receive the link. If you have an ideia/paper/ work in progress you would like to present please feel free to reach out to us! formaldemography.github.io/working_group/

Come check out our panel on Bureaucratic Performance in the Developing World at APSA (Thu, September 11, 12:00 to 1:30pm PDT in East Meeting Level, East 12. I'll be presenting some new work on how farmers and officials in India learned to game satellite-based environmental enforcement.....

Please apply!! RA for research on culture and development. employment.ucsd.edu/research-ass...

Just wanted to say clearly that Gautam Gambhir's comments to the Oval groundsman (heard over the mic) were arrogant, obnoxious and unacceptable. It represents the upper caste privileged Indian mentality.

If anybody is heading to Lund for WEHC next week, come see me present new research with @malikaltaf.bsky.social on "The Great Revolt and its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy in Colonial India". www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/om1q6...

✨Did markets make Americans more cooperative❓🔍 ✅YES‼️ Between 1850 and 1920, the US became the largest and most integrated economy in the world 📶🌎 We show that this shift didn’t just move goods and affect prices—it fundamentally changed culture and behavior 🧵 👇 1/17

The keynote recordings from the 7th EBRD–CEPR Symposium on the Economics of Demographic Change are now online! Talks by: Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (@upenn.edu): www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e... @mdoepke.bsky.social (LSE): www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FRE...

How culture and policy shape each other—and why paying attention to local context is key for development policies' success, from Natalie Bau, Sara Lowes, and Eduardo Montero https://www.nber.org/papers/w33947

Read this, bookmark it, download it (& print it, too, if you want to go all out). But make sure you & yours know that medical history ( #histmed) has a solid response to the nonsense our HHS secretary is spouting. nursingclio.org/2025/06/30/m... 🧪🗃️ And follow @nursingclio.bsky.social. #MiasmaTheory

Delighted that after many years of hard work, Barriers to Global Capital Allocation (written jointly with Bruno Pellegrino and Enrico Spolaore), will be coming out in the QJE. academic.oup.com/qje/article-...

The annual EHS Residential Training Course for Postgraduate Students will be held 3-6 December 2025. 12 part-funded places are available on this course, primarily designed to raise the quality of dissertations. Deadline for applications: 16:00 (UK) Friday 12 September ehs.org.uk/society/stud...

Some personal/professional news: I am excited to be joining the Economics Department @upenn.bsky.social and the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets as a Postdoc in Fall 2025!

This is intriguing -- Language Dialect boundaries block the transmission of Pertussis, but not Measles or Smallpox. www.cell.com/iscience/ful... #linguistics

“Effects of Communal Violence on Women’s Marital Outcomes”: Ghose & Pandey show that following the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat, the prob. of child marriage increased relative to the rest of India while women’s age at marriage, employment & autonomy dropped. read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

Smallpox declined gradually, until the WHO coordinated the global effort to eradicate it

❕New WP from Eric Schneider and Romola Davenport❕ 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐩𝐨𝐱? ⬇️

Hey #EconSky I would like to set up a microgrants for phd-students and postdocs in econ. I.e. microgrants for submission fees, conf fees etc. Q: Does something like that already exist? @climent.bsky.social @joshua-goodman.com @dynarski.bsky.social @ckronenberg.bsky.social

Up next, a tremendous paper led by @shirahebelsela.bsky.social finding that a semester-long virtual contact intervention improved attitudes, reduced dehumanization, and increased self-outgroup overlap among non-Muslim and Muslim students www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Taking a break from American and British politics on this site? Here is a new blog post on Broadstreet about what we can learn about state capacity reversal from a historic episode of ideologically motivated bureaucratic decline in China. If you haven’t subscribed, Broadstreet is now on substack.

“Extending‌ ‌previous‌ ‌work,‌ ‌we‌ ‌vary‌ ‌the‌ ‌race,‌ ‌gender,‌ ‌and‌ ‌topic‌ ‌of‌ ‌the‌ ‌constituent’s‌ ‌message, and we‌ observe ‌if elected‌ ‌officials ‌both open‌ ‌and‌ ‌reply‌ ‌to‌ ‌constituents’ messages‌.‌ ‌ We ‌find‌ ‌that‌ ‌Black‌ ‌men‌ ‌are systematically ignored, regardless of the message they send.‌” link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨 Bottom line: The oft-cited 20–30% CFR for Variola major doesn't hold up across time and place. We argue for a more nuanced, historically grounded view—context matters. 📄 Read the full paper here: www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His... 6/6

So why is the consensus CFR (20-30%) for endemic smallpox too high? Three factors likely biased estimates of CFRs upwards: 1) Under-reporting of smallpox cases 2) Positive selection into vaccination after 1796 3) Selection of severe smallpox cases into hospital samples used to estimate CFRs 5/6

📜 NEW WORKING PAPER 📜 What was the true case fatality rate (CFR) of smallpox? My new paper with Romola Davenport (Cambridge) revisits this question using 18th-century data from Sweden and Iceland—and challenges the long-held belief that smallpox CFRs were 20–30%. 🧵👇 1/6

@vincentdelabastita.bsky.social, Spike Gibbs and I have a new working paper out! We explore the dynamics of wage inequality in medieval England, which allows us to better understand the commercialization of labour markets in the Middle Ages. www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...

The Public Choice Outreach Conference

This summer, @histparl.bsky.social will be joining forces with the University of Worcester hosting a conference to reassess Hastings 230 years on. @royalhistsoc.org @bsecs.bsky.social #skystorians royalhistsoc.org/calendar/the...

#QueenCharlotte gave royal support to Edward Jenner's ground-breaking #smallpox vaccine, which used cowpox to build resistance. Opponents argued that the procedure would give people bovine features 🐮 an idea mocked in this #caricature by James Gillray. #18thcentury #historysky

People who follow me know I maintain a scholarly, multidisciplinary bibliography on the #2ndPlaguePandemic. What I don't include there are popularizations. Or #BadPlagueHistory. I'm flagging this one b/c it (& others) disgrace the medical journals that publish such crap. www.jaad.org/article/S019...

Best video to watch during the Easter break 🥚🐣 youtu.be/lmIABocWBHI?...

Please apply! Send your applications directly to us ☺️

New post on @broadstreetblog.bsky.social by yours truly and co-author José Antonio Espín-Sánchez. Check it out! #econhistory #colonialism #migration www.broadstreet.blog/p/the-making...

Just past 2500 views of my co-authored essay w/ @fancynahyan.bsky.social, "Plague history, Mongol history, and the processes of focalisation leading up to the Black Death." Part of an on-going effort to transform how we understand pandemics. #OneHealth #histmed www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

You create a barrier to trade. Then you can hand out exemptions which, in effect, are rents to key elites who then support you politically. Or, you take bribes for the exemptions. This is how much of the developing world works. And apparently the USA as well now.

role of social connections in the initiation of misuse, sourcing & abuse of opioids is well documented but giving reliable statistical measures of these effects is hard. Our recent work attempts that nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 New paper: when researchers study epidemics, disasters, or conflicts but don't know how many people died, they often subtract pre and post population estimates or do a crude projection. Unfortunately, this almost never provides an accurate death toll 🧵 www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol5...

This paper is now out in JEBO! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Indian economists have been central to development thinking from the early 19th century. This amazing collection of biographical essays on distinguished Indian economists of the past is really worth reading azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/distinguishe...

My essay is on VKRV Rao, who developed the first set of national income estimates for a poor country, founded the Delhi School of Economics, and laid the intellectual foundations of IDA, the concessional funding arm of the World Bank azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/indian-econo...

The zero-sum mindset seems more and more relevant in the current environment. Thank you @harvardmagazine.bsky.social for the video where I explain our research on why zero-sum thinking is so important and where it comes from. www.youtube.com/watch?v=e16o...

Research Assistant- creating a digital map for the AHRC-DFG project Hindu-Muslim-Jewish Origin Legends in Circulation between the Malabar Coast and the Mediterranean, 1400s-1800s - University of Glasgow - College of Arts and Humanities #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMP644/r...

Our study on #demograpic responses of #huntergatherers during the #FinalPalaeolithic in #Europe is out now: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... 💪🏼 Thanks to the great collaborative effort that has gone into putting together an #archaeological #database - available at zenodo.org/records/1313...

This week we have a @broadstreetblog.bsky.social post by @markkoyama.bsky.social, discussing the new edition of the Handbook of New Institutional Economics! www.broadstreet.blog/p/a-new-edit...