
I am a first-year PhD Student in Economic History at the LSE. My research interests lie in Economic History, Population Economics and Political Economy. In my current projects I use large-scale data sources to better understand the economic and political factors that drove the demographic changes of the 18th and 19th century.
I am a member of the Historical Economic Demography group, and am supervised by Eric Schneider and Tom Raster.
You can find my CV here. Email: j.p.ohler@lse.ac.uk
Working Papers
- Malthus in Germany? Reproductive Success and Status in pre-industrial Germany
By exploiting the demographic records of 150,000 individuals from the historical county of Wittgenstein, I test for status gradients in child mortality (the Malthusian positive check) and marital fertility (preventive check). While I find no evidence for a status gradient in child mortality, I find strong evidence for a status gradient in fertility. The richest families had, on average, one-and-a-half extra children compared to their poorer compatriots. Turning to the mechanics of the preventive check, this was driven by delayed marriage in low-status families. Disaggregation of my dataset into six periods reveals that this fertility differential began to disintegrate around 1800.
Presentations: IPECE (UCD), Centre for Economics, Polics, and History (TCD), Irish Economic Association Conference.
Awards: LSE Economic History Best Dissertation (2023), Francesca Carnevali Prize (2024).
Work in Progress
- Build Better Health: Public Housing and the Mortality Transition - with
Alan de Bromhead (UCD), and
Ronan Lyons (TCD)
Draft expected March 2025.
Presentations: University of Cork, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, LSE Demography Seminar, CEPR Applied Micro-Economic History Workshop, South Denmark University*, CEPR Public Health Interventions in the Long Run Workshop*, Economic History Society Conference*.
- Representation and Organisational Performance: Evidence from the Trenches -
with
Oliver Brufal (University of Groningen)
Draft expected Summer 2025.
Presentations: Cambridge Graduate Seminar, LSE Politcal Economy & Economic History WIP Seminar*.
Research Experience
- December 2024 - ongoing Research Assistant to Eric Schneider.
Build OCR pipeline for the automated transcription of handwritten historical tables.
- October 2023 - June 2024 Research Assistant to Ronan Lyons.
Worked on Urban Economics and Irish Economic History. Used advance NLP and OCR methods for data transcription.
- August 2021 - August 2022 Research Assistant to Tomas Cvrcek.
Transcribed historical sources from the Austro-Hungarian empire and worked with ArcGIS to geocode data.
Presentations
Upcoming:
- 27th Febuary LSE Seminar for Political Economy and Economic History (SPEECH)
Representation and Organisational Performance: Evidence from the Trenches.
- 11th March South Denmark University Economics Seminar
Reproductive Inequality, Mobility, and Status in pre-industrial Germany.
- 17th March CEPR Public Health Interventions in the Long Run Workshop
Build Better Health: Public Housing and the Mortality Transition.
Past:
- 2025
CEPR Applied Micro-Economic History Workshop. LSE Demography Seminar.