This paper provides an empirical investigation of the hypothesis that population shocks such as the repeated outbreaks of the plague affected the timing of the demographic transition. The empirical analysis uses disaggregate data from Germany and exploits geographic variation in the exposure to medieval plague shocks. The findings document that areas with greater exposure to plague outbreaks exhibited an earlier onset of the demographic transition. The results are consistent with the predictions of the unified growth literature and provide novel insights into the largely unexplored empirical determinants of the timing of the transition from stagnation to growth.

In contrast to widespread concerns that COVID‐19 lockdowns have substantially increased the incidence of domestic violence, research based on police‐recorded crimes or calls‐for‐service has typically found small and often even negligible effects. One explanation for this discrepancy is that lockdowns have left victims of domestic violence trapped in‐home with their perpetrators, limiting their ability to safely report incidents to the police. To overcome this measurement problem, we propose a model‐based algorithm for measuring temporal variation in domestic violence incidence using internet search activity and make precise the conditions under which this measure yields less biased estimates of domestic violence problem during periods of crisis than commonly used police‐recorded crime measures. Analysing the COVID‐19 lockdown in Greater London, we find a 40% increase in our internet search‐based domestic violence index at the peak occurring 3–6 weeks into the lockdown, ‐seven to eight times larger than the increase in police‐recorded crimes and much closer to the increase in helpline calls reported by victim support charities. Applying the same methodology to Los Angeles, we find strikingly similar results. We conclude that evidence based solely on police‐recorded domestic violence incidents cannot reliably inform us about the scale of the domestic violence problem during crises like COVID‐19.

Victims of domestic abuse may struggle to contact the police. But they are likely to seek help on the internet. By using internet search data to measure domestic violence during the Covid‐19 pandemic, Dan Anderberg, Helmut Rainer and Fabian Siuda found an increase several times larger than that suggested in official police records

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