This is a definitive new account of Britain's economic evolution from a backwater of Europe in 1270 to the hub of the global economy in 1870. A team of leading economic historians reconstruct Britain's national accounts for the first time right back into the thirteenth century to show what really happened quantitatively during the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to traditional views of the earlier period as one of Malthusian stagnation, they reveal how the transition to modern economic growth built on the earlier foundations of a persistent upward trend in GDP per capita which doubled between 1270 and 1700. Featuring comprehensive estimates of population, land use, agricultural production, industrial and service-sector production and GDP per capita, as well as analysis of their implications, this will be an essential reference for anyone interested in British economic history and the origins of modern economic growth more generally.

We show experimentally that fairness concerns may have a decisive impact on the actual and optimal choice of contracts in a moral hazard context. Bonus contracts that offer a voluntary and unenforceable bonus for satisfactory performance provide powerful incentives and are superior to explicit incentive contracts when there are some fair-minded players, but trust contracts that pay a generous wage up front are less efficient than incentive contracts. The principals understand this and predominantly choose the bonus contracts. These results are consistent with recently developed theories of fairness, which offer important new insights into the interaction of contract choices, fairness, and incentives. Copyright The Econometric Society 2007.

The version presented here is a working paper or pre-print that may be later published elsewhere. If a published version is known of, the above WRAP url will contain details on finding it.

This article presents new estimates for investment and new growth accounts for three socialist economies between 1950 and 1989. Government statistics reported distorted measures for both the rate and the trajectory of productivity growth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Researchers have benefited from revised output data, but have continued to use official statistics on capital input, or estimated capital stock from official investment data. Investment levels and rates of capital accumulation were much lower than officially claimed and over-reporting worsened over time. A setback in factor accumulation-both investment in equipment and labour inputcontributed very significantly to the socialist growth failure of the 1980s.

This article presents estimates of aggregate and per capita GDP in constant prices for Europe over the period 1870Á2000. Following the approach of Bairoch, we present figures for the continent as a whole and for individual countries on the basis of changing boundaries. This is complementary to the Maddison data-set, where country data are presented on the basis of constant boundaries. Data on the basis of the boundaries of the time are more convenient for comparative historical analysis, and can be combined more easily with data from contemporary sources, such as official statistical collections. Regional totals are also provided.