Tracy Dennison

Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth

This paper scrutinizes the recently postulated link between the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and economic success. A metastudy of the historical demography literature shows that the EMP did not prevail throughout Europe, its three key components did not always coincide, and its more extreme manifestations were associated with economic stagnation rather than growth. There is no evidence that the EMP improved economic performance by empowering women, increasing human capital investment, adjusting population to economic trends, or sustaining beneficial cultural norms. European economic success was not caused by the EMP and its sources must therefore be sought in other factors.

Institutions, Demography, and Economic Growth

This article evaluates criticisms by Sarah G. Carmichael, Alexandra de Pleijt, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Tine De Moor of our view of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), and explains why their claims are incorrect. We elaborate our arguments concerning the institutional sources of economic growth, explore the relationship between womens position and the EMP, analyze the two-way links between demographic and economic behavior, and explicate aspects of our empirical analysis that these scholars find puzzling. The causes of European economic growth, we reiterate, are not to be found in the EMP but rather must be sought in the wider framework of nonfamilial institutions.

Household formation, institutions, and economic development: Evidence from imperial Russia

Household formation patterns have been adduced in recent years by historians and other social scientists to account for the economic development of western Europe. The so-called European Marriage Pattern, which prevailed throughout northwest Europe, is viewed as having been particularly conducive to early industrialisation and economic growth. But to what extent were household formation systems exogenous to the broader economic and social context in which they were located? Evidence from nineteenth-century Russia indicates that family systems were influenced by the same variables that determined the shape of the local economy; they were part of a complex web of institutions and thus cannot be viewed as independent determinants of economic development.

Living Standards in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Most of the studies of living standards in pre-revolutionary Russia by economic historians have focused on a narrow range of measures for predominantly urban areas. A micro-level analysis that employs a broader set of measures of well-being for a small rural region in central Russia suggests that, contrary to previous findings, living standards were improving throughout the nineteenth century, even in seemingly less dynamic rural areas. Moreover, the variation in income and consumption patterns, human-capital development, and the distribution of resources in the countryside was greater than typically assumed. Since state and local institutions might be able to account for it, these determinants should be emphasized in future analyses of rural living standards in pre-Soviet Russia.

Contract enforcement in Russian serf society, 1750–1860

This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate.

The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World. By Allen Douglas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2012. Pp. ix, 267.

For Douglas Allen, the past can be divided roughly into two eras: the old times, characterized by peculiar and exotic institutions, such as dueling, venality, and patronage, and the modern era, characterized by wages and prices, technology, and meritocracy. Allen argues that the transition, c. 1850, from the old world to the new was effected by more precise, standardized systems of measurement. Before the modern era it was impossible to measure the most basic things: time, distance, trade volume, labor productivity. As economies gradually expanded with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, new institutions, such as standardized forms of measurement, were created to reduce transactions costs, making growth and wealth creation possible.