The British Industrial Revolution is reviewed in the light of recent developments in modeling economic growth. It is argued that ”endogenous innovation” models may be useful in this context particularly for understanding why total factor productivity growth rose only slowly. ”Macroinventions” were central to economic development in this period, however, and these are best seen as exogenous technological shocks. Although new growth theorists would easily identify higher growth potential in eighteenth-century Britain than in France, explaining the timing of the acceleration in growth remains elusive. A research agenda to develop further insights from new growth ideas is proposed.

Between 1890 and 1914, California agriculture rapidly shifted from extensive to intensive crops, emerging as one of the world's major suppliers of Mediterranean products. Based on an analysis of new data on price and quantity movements, this article calls into question the traditional emphasis on changes in transportation, water, and labor market conditions as explanations for California's transformation. It argues that increases in fruit supply outpaced increases in demand and that declining farm interest rates and biological learning played crucial, if relatively neglected, roles in the intensification process.

This article offers a new interpretation of the low level of investment in Germany during the interwar period. Earlier contributions attributed the slow expansion of capital stock either to excessive wages due to state intervention and unionization or to the high cost of capital. These hypotheses are tested by estimating a cointegration model of investment. Counterfactual simulations demonstrate that lower wages would have lowered investment still further and that high interest rates acted as the main brake on investment during the second half of the 1920s.

This article investigates the decline in turnover of manufacturing workers in the United States that occurred in the 1920s. Three labor-supply explanations are evaluated using aggregate data on manufacturing workers and case studies of four manufacturing firms. The labor-supply analysis does not yield a satisfying explanation of the decline in quit rates of manufacturing workers. The suggestion is made that an examination of firms' employment policies is necessary to explain why workers were quitting their jobs less frequently.

When the Spaniards conquered the New World, they resorted to a form of native labor organization called the encomienda. The encomienda differed from slavery in that the Crown imposed inheritance, trading, and relocation restrictions on encomenderos. Such restrictions cost the Crown revenue by providing incentives for colonists to deplete more quickly the stock of native labor and by keeping native labour in areas of low-revenue productivity. This loss of revenue makes the Crown's Preference for the encomienda curious. The Crown opted for the encomienda, however, to secure its rule and to satisfy an ideological bias against slavery.

The image of the “backward” immigrant has enjoyed a prominent place in American history, in large part because of the perceived “non-American” fertility behavior of many immigrant groups. The European perspective on these migrants, however, has been to see them as innovators, breaking free from the demographic constraints of the Old World. Drawing upon a large sample of reconstituted Norwegian immigrant families, this article examines the rising and then declining fertility of this group over the second half of the nineteenth century. It concludes that their fertility experience was influenced both by cultural tenacity and economic opportunity.

Even in a country whose patron saint is the Horatio Alger hero, there is no parallel to their [the Japanese American] success strory.

The view that Japanese and other Asian Americans constituted an economic success story gained popularity in the mass media and among scholars during the 1960s. At a time when the demands of the Civil Rights movement were challenging the government to redress the racism ingrown in American society, Japanese and other Asian Americans were often held up as “model minorities” who had overcome discrimination through their own efforts and without aid from government laws or service programs2. This practise has led to a debate over both the extent of the successs of Asian Americans and the reasons for their economic achievement3.