I have recently completed a working paper which has now been submitted (thank you a great many scholars who provided comments notably Judy Stephenson and Mark Koyama). That paper basically went back modestly on one datapoint in the work of Robert Allen which was published in 2001 in Explorations in Economic History. 

Probably one of the greatest ten papers in the field of economic history for the last twenty-five years, Allen’s article has had a tremendous influence. It introduced a new method of comparing real wages at a time when very few goods were traded internationally and most prices were determined at the local level. In using what we now call “welfare ratios” (which are akin to poverty lines), Allen managed to compare many countries before the industrial revolution.

My entire research agenda has been to improve on this stupendous work and to increase the constellation of observations as part…