From Malthus to Solow: How did the Malthusian economy really evolve?

Malthusian Dynamics in a Diverging Europe: Northern Italy, 1650–1881

“…The results suggested that the endogenous adjustment of population to real wage fluctuations ceased to exist after 1740, with the positive check eradicated long before the industrial revolution. These results are echoed by Crafts & Mills (2009), who in addition to VAR also provide structural model estimates of the Malthusian system in state space. This technique found weak homeostasis (the system adjusts very slowly to equilibrium) in state space which operated almost solely through the preventive check on fertility.…”

“…This problem is exacerbated when we allow for the possibility of time-varying intercepts in the check equations. 5 If these series contain unit roots the standard statistical tools are likely to become redundant as the estimated parameters could have non-degenerate limiting distributions.…”

The Preventive Check in Medieval and Preindustrial England

“…All find little if any impact of living standards on marriage rates (Lee 1981;Weir 1984;Bailey and Chambers 1993;Lee and Anderson 2001;Crafts and Mills 2009). This paper uses new data on medieval and early modern marriages and finds, by contrast, that a strong positive check operated.…”

The Rise of the English Economy 1300-1900: A Lasting Response to Demographic Shocks

“…The negative correlation between population and wages is clear until the end of the 18 th century, after which both population and wages start to grow together (Crafts and Mills, 2009). That is to say, the timing of take-off in wages lagged behind that in pop- The two data sources used in this paper-demographic data from Wrigley and Schofield (1981) and wage data (builders, coal miners and agricultural workers) from Clark (2013)-are graphed and summarised in Appendix I.…”

“…To our knowledge, however, the present exercise is the first attempt to explain such a long history with a DGSE model. A fundamental advantage of this approach over quasiMalthusian VARs is that the VAR models require all explained variables to be observable (Nicolini, 2007;Moller and Sharp, 2008;Crafts and Mills, 2009), whereas unobservable endogenous variables (in particular, human capital) can also be derived and simulated in our DSGE model. Moreover, the DSGE model can clearly identify the structural shocks and their implications, whereas identification is always problematic with VARs.…”