Montreal: Economic History City

I am writing this short update from Montréal, host city for the 2018 Meetings of the Economic History Association. I had a little wonder around the McGill campus this morning, and am about to visit the Museum of Fine Arts. I am very much looking forward to the conference, which starts tomorrow. 

​From the conference programme, I can see quite a few contributors to An Economist's Guide will be here: Guido Alfani, Vellore Arthi, Jari Eloranta, Price Fishback, Rowena Gray, Noel Johnson, Mark Koyama, Alexander Moradi, Larry Neal, Cormac Ó Gráda, Richard Steckel, and, of course, yours truly! That's 12 out of 51 of the book's authors in one place. Note bad!

On Sunday, I will be presenting a paper I wrote with Matthias and Eoin on the Great Irish Famine. We used our prison dataset to do some anthropometrics, the study of human height - a surprisingly good indicator of health when you haven't got other statistics to hand. We find evidence that those who survived the Famine and reached adulthood are highly selected bunch who did not themselves suffer famine malnutrition and disease. We think this is an important result for a number of reasons, not least because related studies do a bad job of considering selection effects. You can read the full paper here.

Meanwhile, Matthias and I have been putting in the finishing touches to the book proofs. All the missing references are now sorted, and Adi's new visually-appealing graphics uploaded. We will see another version in a couple of weeks to make any last-minute changes, and then it is off to the printers!

Chris.