Professor Neil Cummins
Neil Cummins is Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics, where he also received his PhD in 2009. His research themes are “life, love and death”; Neil uses Historical Big Data to answer fundamental questions about economics, demography and history. Previously he has published papers on the decline of fertility in Europe, the effects of bubonic plague in London, the dynamics of the Malthusian economy, in France, and the lifespans of European Elites since the 9thcentury. Together with Greg Clark, he has documented the glacial rate of social mobility over the past 1,000 years in Britain. Currently he is using the individual information of hundreds of millions of English, 1838 to today, to describe and characterise wealth inequality, the hidden wealth of the English elite, assortment in the marriage market, and ethnic assimilation in England. This research will add new micro-evidence, on a population scale, for the historical development of, and the causal forces creating, inequality in contemporary Britain. His methods combine economic logic and historical sources with big data analytics. His research papers are available on his website.
