The Black Death and the origin of the European marriage pattern

This paper evaluates criticisms of our view that there is no evidence of the Black Death having caused the European Marriage Pattern. The attempt by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth to rebut our argument fails completely. Their claim that we distort the historical evidence is entirely without foundation. They do not engage with the fact that historical demographers are widely divided on when this marriage pattern emerged and that the data are too fragile for any definitive conclusions about the period before c. 1540. They sidestep the logic of their own model, refusing to acknowledge that the factual inaccuracy of one key assumption makes the model completely inapplicable to demographic behaviour in England after the Black Death. They repeatedly refer to evidence on demographic behaviour centuries later than the Black Death with no attempt to explain how it could be relevant to the aftermath of that pandemic. This weakness also applies to the econometric evidence they adduce, but that evidence is further vitiated by the invalidity of the instrumental variables they use.