New benchmark estimates of Black-White income ratios for 1870, 1900, and 1940 are combined with standard post-World War census data. The resulting time series reveals that the pace of racial income convergence has generally been steady but slow, quickening only during the 1940s and the modern Civil Rights era. I explore the interpretation of the time series with a model of intergenerational transmission of inequality in which racial differences in causal factors that determine income are very large just after the Civil War and which erode slowly across subsequent generations.

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

This article explores the risks and returns to currency speculation during the 1920s and 1930s. We study the performance of two well-known technical trading strategies (carry and momentum) and compare them with that of a fundamentals-based trader: John Maynard Keynes. Technical strategies were highly profitable during the 1920s and even outperformed Keynes. In the 1930s, however, both technical strategies and Keynes performed relatively poorly. While our results reveal the existence of profitable opportunities for currency traders in the interwar years, they suggest that such profits were necessary compensation for enduring the substantial risks that all strategies entailed.

We use newly available micro-data from the 1911 to 1941 Canadian Censuses to investigate the impact of immigration on the Canadian earnings distribution in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that Canadian inequality rose sharply in the inter-war years, particularly in the 1920s, coinciding with two of the largest immigration decades in Canadian history. We find that immigration was not the main force driving changes in the earnings distribution. This results from a combination of self-selection by immigrants, occupational adjustments after arrival, and general equilibrium adjustments in the economy.

This article shows that there were timing, geographic, and sectoral anomalies in the 1937/38 recession, none of which are easily explained by aggregate shocks. I argue that an auto industry supply shock contributed both to the recession's anomalies and to its severity. Labor-strife-induced wage increases and an increase in raw material costs led auto manufacturers to raise prices in fall 1937. Expectations of these price increases brought auto sales forward. When auto prices finally rose, sales plummeted. This shock likely reduced 1938 auto sales by roughly 600,000 units and 1938 GDP growth by 0.5–1 percentage point.

This article reassesses the causes of Chicago state bank failures during the Great Depression by tracking the evolution of their balance sheets in the 1920s. I find that all banks suffered tremendous deposit withdrawals; however banks that failed earlier in the 1930s had invested more in mortgages in the 1920s. The main problem with mortgages was their lack of liquidity, not their quality. Banks heavily engaged in mortgages did not have enough liquid assets to face the withdrawals, and failed. This article thus reasserts the importance of pre-crisis liquidity risk management in preventing bank failures.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the origins of globalization. It examines the process of commodity price convergence, an indicator of globalization, between Europe and Asia on the basis of newly obtained price data from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Prices for many commodities in the Dutch-Asiatic trade converged already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the growth of trade and competition among traders and companies. The extent of convergence, however, was determined, in part, by the ability of the VOC to control commodity markets.

Starting from the Medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of villages over a period of six centuries (thirteenth-nineteenth). Based on this original dataset, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change in which gender-biased inheritance systems emerged as a defensive measure to preserve the wealth of village insiders. This institutional change also had implications for the population growth, marriage strategies, and the protection from economic shocks.