Karine van der Beek is a senior lecturer at the economics department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a research affiliate at the Centre of Economic Policy Research (CEPR). She specializes in European economic history and long-run economic growth with a specific interest in the relationship between human capital, financial markets, political institutions and technological change. Karine holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a post-doc fellow at EUI and at UPF as part of the CEPR Research Training Network, ‘Unifying the European Experience’ in the years 2006-7. Her current research examines the effect of enclosures in eighteenth century England on financial markets and bankruptcies. In her other studies she applies econometric and ML tolls to uncover the role played by various skills and occupations in Britain’s Industrial Revolution.