Elite violence and elite numeracy in Europe from 500 to 1900 CE: roots of the divergence

2020/04/30 by Thomas Keywood, Jörg Baten · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies

paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11698-020-00206-1

openalex publication_date 2020/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

Abstract Our research expands earlier studies on elite human capital by widening the geographic scope and tracing the early roots of the European divergence. We present new evidence of elite numeracy in Europe since the sixth century CE. During the early medieval period, Western Europe had no advantage over the east, but the development of relative violence levels changed this. After implementing an instrumental variable strategy and a battery of robustness tests, we find a substantial relationship between elite numeracy and elite violence, and conclude that violence had a detrimental impact on human capital formation. For example, the disparities in violence between Eastern and Western Europe helped to shape the famous divergence movement via this elite numeracy mechanism and had substantial implications for the economic fortunes of each region over the following centuries.

Citations

• Book production and the onset of modern economic growth
• On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough*
• Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem
• The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War
• MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF A COMMUNIST COMMAND ECONOMY: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE CIA ESTIMATES FOR THE U.S.S.R.
• Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries
• Bootstrap-Based Improvements for Inference with Clustered Errors
• The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth
• The standard errors of persistence
• Land inequality and numeracy in Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth century
• The New Cambridge Medieval History

Cited by

• Jörg Baten [wikipedia]