Team
Dr Ben Schneider (Project Leader)
Ben Schneider is an economic historian of work and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University. He received his DPhil in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford in which he constructed the first historical measure of good jobs, the Historical Occupational Quality Index. He has published highly-cited research in the Economic History Review and has also published in Economic History of Developing Regions. Dr Schneider's work has been featured in the Financial Times and The Economist, and his public outreach has included articles for the Times Literary Supplement, Project Syndicate, and the British Academy Review.
Jane Whittle is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Exeter and a world-leading expert in early modern labor and gender history. She is the PI of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Forms of Labour: Gender, Freedom and Experience of Work in the Preindustrial Economy” and has been PI of research projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Economic & Social Research Council, and the Economic History Society. She is the author of The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440–1580 (Oxford University Press, 2000), the co-author of Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth Century Household (Oxford University Press, 2012) and editor of Servants in Rural Europe c. 1400–c. 1900 (Boydell Press, 2017) and Landlords and Tenants in Britain 1440–1660: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited (Boydell Press, 2013). She has published articles and book chapters in leading international journals including Past & Present, The Economic History Review, Agricultural History Review, and Continuity & Change. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and has been Chair of the British Agricultural History Society.
Judy Stephenson is a pioneering economic historian of work in the 18th and 19th centuries and Professor of Economic History of the Built Environment at the Barlett School for Sustainable Construction, University College London. She is the author of Contracts and Pay: Work in London Construction, 1660–1785 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and the co-editor of Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Dr Stephenson’s next book, Wages Before Machines, is under contract with Princeton University Press (2023). She has published ten articles in international journals including the Economic History Review and Enterprise & Society, and her highly-cited research has been featured in the Financial Times and The Economist. She is currently a Trustee and Honorary Secretary of the Economic History Society and a Director of the Long Run Institute.
Robin Philips is a leading expert on historical wellbeing and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University. He is a member of the interdisciplinary research team behind the Better Well-Being Index, an initiative in collaboration between the university’s strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies and the research department of Rabobank. Following his doctoral work on regional economic development and industrialization, he became the co-editor of An Economic History of Regional Industrialization (Routledge, 2020), and has published in international journals including Historical Methods as well as contributed several book chapters. Dr Philips has contributed policy recommendations including pieces in the economists’ magazine Economisch Statistische Berichten (Economic Statistical Reports). He is a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History, a Lecturer at Utrecht University, and has also been a Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.
Meredith Paker is Assistant Professor of Economics at Grinnell College and an expert in historical labor economics and econometrics. She received her DPhil in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford and she was a finalist for the Alexander Gerschenkron Prize, awarded by the Economic History Association for the best PhD thesis in economic history outside the United States. During her doctoral research, Dr Paker won the Lyne Doti Award for best graduate student paper from the Economic & Business History Society. She was previously a Marshall Scholar at Oxford.
Vincent Delabastita is Assistant Professor of Economics at Radboud University and a leader in applied microeconomics. His research includes studies of working conditions, employer collusion, women’s wages, and technological change in the 19th and 20th centuries using large digitized datasets, and he has published in the European Review of Economic History and has a paper forthcoming in the highly-ranked Journal of Economic History. He received his PhD from KU Leuven, supported by a Doctoral Fellowship for Fundamental Research from Research Foundation Flanders.