The fiscal policy accomplishments of the ancien régime during its last two decades in France have been greatly underappreciated. While the collapse of the monarchy has been attributed to persistent peacetime deficits, these did not appear until the mid-1780s when earlier reforms and successful budget policies were abandoned by reactionary finance ministers. Had the earlier policies been continued, it is unlikely that a severe crisis would have occurred in 1788/89.

This article estimates biases to technical change in Canadian manufacturing from 1900 to 1929, and compares these to estimates of biased technical change in U.S. manufacturing. Significant differences are found between similar industries in the two countries, indicating that Canadian manufacturers did not use U.S. technology in unaltered fashion, but adapted it to be more cost efficient under Canadian factor market conditions.

U.S. Steel held two-thirds of the American market in 1901, but by the 1930s its share had dropped to one-third. Such a decline is consistent with the economic theory of oligopoly pricing and capacity expansion, but the available data offer limited opportunities for formal testing of hypotheses. A close examination of U.S. Steel's early history leads us to argue that Chairman Elbert Gary's desire for price stability, his fear of antitrust litigation, and shortcomings in the firm's organizational capability constrained it from the unbridled pursuit of discounted profits that the economic theory assumes.

The article tests a variant of Lars G. Sandberg's “financial sophistication hypothesis.” Sandberg argues that Sweden had an unusually large stock of financial capital in 1850 which, along with a highly literate populace, was paramount in the subsequent economic explosion. Unable to test the hypothesis directly, we use a variant—that the financial sector was a leading sector in Swedish development—amenable to time-series tests of the Granger-causality form. These tests on data from 1861 to 1910 do not show causality from financial variables to real; indeed, the converse holds.

This article investigates the characteristics of early settlers on the midwestern farming frontier, the correlates of their geographic mobility, and the determinants of their wealth. Using evidence drawn from the 1850, 1860, and 1870 federal censuses we find average rates of growth of wealth over time that were considerably above the national average, a steeper cross-sectional relationship between wealth and age than those found for contemporary national samples, and a substantial positive effect of early arrival on the frontier on wealth levels. Very high levels of economic opportunity may have been a characteristic of the farming frontier.

Previous studies explain the extension of royal power in fifteenth-century France by the professionalization of military combat or by the commercialization of economic activity. Neither approach can account for the turnaround in Charles VII's fortunes between 1435 and 1445. Using Lösch's model of spatial competition to examine the determinants of state borders, we suggest that the key factor in the formation of the French hexagon was an innovation in artillery projectiles that increased military scale economies. A reduction in state economic intervention apparently accompanied this development rather than the increase suggested elsewhere.

New Jersey played a dominant role in the merger wave at the turn of the century. The state facilitated the rise of large firms by liberalizing its corporation law in exchange for incorporation fees and franchise taxes. This article suggests that chartermongering emerged from the U.S. federal political system and the economic structure of the state. Delaware became the preferred state of incorporation as New Jersey's economic structure changed.