Recently, I was thinking about Joel Mokyr's classic "Why Ireland Starved" which basically argued that overpopulation was not a thing in 19th c. Ireland. Loved that book. I decided to google some follow-ups and found this neat piece in "Land Economics" #econhist #econtwitter 
The piece is elegantly simple and instructive. It does a simple econometric trick -- add a land quality index to see if overpopulation (proxied by land/pop ratio) was a thing. The author used pretty simple tools to make the adjustment. jstor.org/stable/3146668…
In the end, he found that there were signs of overpopulation.
I am not posting this because I agree with the finding (I am not an Irish economic history expert, merely a follower who is interested). However, it shows great ways to do economic history. Sometimes, you just need to get more data to test.
And by more data, I don't mean more data points. That's not economics (although it never hurts). It means finding measures that are more consistent with the theory being tested. Its a neat little paper.
Those who teach economic history could use this as a paper to teach about methodology and, probably if the data is out there and available, try to replicate it for applied econometrics classes. #econhist #econtwitter
