EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Grain prices and mortality: A note on 'La Michodiere's Law'

Jean-Michel Chevet and Cormac Ó Gráda

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2006, vol. 13, issue 2, 183-194

Abstract: In a postscript to his Recherches sur la population (1766), political arithmetician Louis Messance made the case for a positive association mortality and the price of wheat. The true author of the postscript was probably Jean-Baptiste Francois de la Michodiere (1720 - 97), Messance's mentor and employer. The calculations given in this paper offer tempered support for what is dubbed 'La Michodiere's law'. There was indeed a correlation between prices and mortality in early eighteenth-century France; but La Michodiere's own and other data imply that even then it was weaker and less mechanical than implied by some of his successors.

Keywords: Corn prices; mortality; economic demography; famine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09672560600708086 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Grain prices and mortality: a note on La Michodières law (2004) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:13:y:2006:i:2:p:183-194

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672560600708086

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by Richard Sturn, Hans Michael Trautwein, Muriel Dal-Pont-Legrand and Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-07-02
Handle: RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:13:y:2006:i:2:p:183-194