HHB is delighted to announce that Robert Allen - Global Distinguished Professor of Economic History at the New York University in Abu Dhabi - is now part of the HHB Advisory Board.

Former Senior Research Fellow at the Nuffield College, Oxford University, Prof. Allen’s research aims to understand the process of economic growth. Why are some countries rich and others poor? This research is focused on measuring changes in living standards across Europe and Asia between 1600 and 1900, measuring and explaining productivity growth in English agriculture between 1300 and 1800, understanding the origins of modern technology and research and development in the industrial revolution, and studying the impact of imperialism on Asian economic growth between 1870 and 1940.

Currently, he is studying the global history of wages and prices, pre-industrial living standards around the world, the economic history of the Middle East, and the causes of global inequality. Professor Allen is also a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Canada.

The Historical Household Budget database is constantly growing, extending to new countries, social groups, time periods, and data sources. So too is the network of researchers growing, comprising economists, historians, statisticians, and anyone else with an interest in developing the methods and interpreting the results of studies based on historical family budgets. We welcome new collaborators with relevant datasets, and are eager for any indications of possible new data sources, no matter how few or seemingly-obscure. Please contact us.

Growing the HHB database requires a constant effort in acquiring, digitising, organising, and statistically summarising family budget data. Exploiting the HHDB for research similarly requires extracting, linking, and manipulating data from the files. The Project accordingly offers (typically) unpaid part-time research internships, supervised by HHB investigators and lasting up to three months, for students with an interest in learning about household budgets, data management, and statistical analysis. To inquire about research internships, please contact us.

HHB is delighted to announce the affiliation to the Project of Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. Researchers in the University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, led by Beatrice Penati are collaborating with HHB to develop a database of household budgets from Russian and Soviet Central Asia covering the years from late 18th century to WWII. The richness of the data and the time and place that they illuminate represent a tremendous addition to the HHB database.