You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 21 January 2026, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Samad Sarferaz (ETH Zurich) will be talking about “Colors of Growth”.
More information can be found here:
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higher-frequency fluctuations—such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks—that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.