The federal budget, a long-sought goal of fiscal reformers, became a reality with the passage of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. This paper is concerned with one of the key expectations of the reformers, that the adoption of a formal budget would produce better estimates of federal revenues and expenditures. The conclusion is that there is little evidence of a dramatic improvement that could be attributed to the reform, although there is some evidence that the quality of the estimates improved over the long run. The paper then discusses the reasons for and implications of this finding.

The Waltham system of labor force recruitment and treatment is well known to students of American economic history. Inaugurated by the Boston Manufacturing Company at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813, the system was widely copied in the establishment of New England textile villages for several decades. And, since the textile industry was the leading manufacturing activity in the United States until the Civil War, the Waltham system for a time formed the core of industrial relations in manufacturing.

The construction and improvement of farm buildings in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century was a task of farmcapital formation exceeded only by the effort to clear the land itself. As uses of the farmer's time and capital, the erection of the first crude shelters and the steady additions to the dwelling and to other farm buildings are of major interest and importance in the analysis of American agricultural development. The statistics available to measure this work are adequate to command attention; like all statistics of this period, they must, of course, be employed with caution.

The California Marine Research Committee was established by the state legislature in 1947 in response to the catastrophic failure of the Pacific Coast sardine fishery. Scientists, state and federal resource-managment officials, and industry leaders put aside long–standing differences of viewpoint to launch a uniquely comprehensive, multidisciplinary research effort. This paper, based on newly opened archival materials, analyzes the founding and early work of the agency. How a stalemate occurred that delayed a consensus on policy recommendations and had the practical effect of continuing virtually unregulated sardine fishing is explained. The article illustrates the institutional development of post–war “Big Science” as a major actor in the policy process and analyzes the mobilization of public agencies to cope with complex environmental issues in resource–extractive industries.

Coal company towns were infamous, being described as exploitive, and charged with providing low-quality services, like sanitation. Yet, the quality of sanitation in coal towns in 1922 appears similar to that in cities of similar size, although lagging behind that in major cities. Within the coal region, company and independent towns provided similar levels of sanitation. The quality of sanitation in company towns varied in response to cost-related factors, including town age, population, and natural location. Meanwhile, workers were mobile and demanded compensating increases in wage rates in towns with lower-quality sanitation and higher rents.

Germany in the 1830's gave few if any indications of its great industrial potentialities. The population was overwhelmingly rural and agrarian; Berlin was the only city containing more than 100,000 inhabitants, and the great majority of “cities” (in the legal sense) numbered less than 10,000. Nonagricultural production was carried on for the most part in the home or in small shops employing the old handicraft techniques. The pattern of foreign trade was that which has since come to be associated with “underdeveloped” agrarian nations: exports of agricultural products (grain, wool) and the output of artisanal industries, imports of manufactured goods and exotic wares. In those industries that were to lead the way in Germany's industrialization there were as yet no signs of growth. The few spinning factories that were set up in the 1820's and 1830's employed mainly English and Alsatian machinery, and sometimes foreign capital as well. Coal production lagged behind that of tiny Belgium, and was no greater than that of mineral-poor France. The small, dispersed iron industry was still almost universally conducted with the ancient charcoal technique, and the famed chemical industry was still to be born. The Zollverein was just beginning its great work of economic unification; the effective realization of its promise had to await more adequate means of transportation and financial institutions to provide capital; but by 1840 there were only a few short, isolated lines of railway and no modern credit facilities.

France's canal age was largely the outgrowth of the plan proposed by François Becquey, the state administrator who orchestrated a successful campaign to convince influential Frenchmen that a nationwide canal network was one of the essential tasks of their generation. As Becquey originally conceived his plan, canal building would directly contribute to economic growth and help foster a spirit of business enterprise. In the end he had to settle for a scheme under which the government paid a steep price to a handful of financial consortia for the right to assume all the risks and costs of building and operating the system itself.

This article analyzes the connection between investment decisions and financing arrangements in the nineteenth-century American whaling industry. Managers of whaling ventures shared their risks by selling some equity claims but retained a substantial portion due to moral hazard considerations. As a result, they had little incentive to consider the covariance between their own returns, and those of others, in planning their voyages. This stifled diversity in whaling voyages and increased industry-wide risk. The analysis suggests a link between financial market development, or the extent of risk sharing in financial markets, and the range of economic activities pursued.

It is generally recognized that the Dutch played a major part in financing British government deficits from the 1720s to the late 1770s. This article argues that even though the Dutch continued to hold large amounts of British debt after 1780, they stopped supplying new capital to the British and started a modest repatriation of some of their previous investments. A comparative econometric study of 3 percent consol yields during the two deficit-inducing wars Britain fought between 1750 and 1795 shows that as a result British interest rates became much more sensitive to increases in government borrowing.

This study looks at the valuation of U.K. investment trusts for the 50 years following their appearance as companies in the 1880s. Based on a large and unique dataset compiled from primary sources, our calculations reveal a huge variation between the ordinary share prices of investment trusts and their underlying net asset “fundamental” values. This mismatch is a well-known puzzle in modern financial markets and has attracted a large volume of research because it casts doubt on the concept of market efficiency. We investigate possible explanations for this pricing puzzle and shed light on U.K. investor behavior before the 1930s.

Forecasting developments in firm and industry studies during the next decade is a risky business. Students of firms and industries ask widely different questions about the causes, processes, and/or results of change, and they employ an equally wide variety of methodologies in seeking answers. As a result, objectives are more surrounded and enveloped than taken in accordance with a widely accepted and nicely articulated battleplan. This paper, then, is not offered as a battleplan for the next decade but as a survey of the fronts where the possibilities of advance seem most promising, with some effort to suggest targets and weaponry that are or might become relevant.

When imported slaves were first sold in New Orleans, buyers were unaware of the slaves’ unobservable characteristics. In time, the new owners learned more about their slaves and may have resold the “lemons.” Previous research suggests that buyers anticipated such adverse selection and reduced their bids for these slaves. Consequently, we should observe lower prices for resold slaves. We test this proposition by linking the sequential sales records of 568 slaves. Through a comparison of initial and resale prices, we find little evidence to support the hypothesis that adverse selection lowered the price of resold slaves.

My object in this article is to use the historical evidence of one man's life to raise questions concerning the way we have come to understand our technological history. Inventors and mechanicians have long occupied a prominent place in American history. However, the bases for selecting and certifying these national heroes have resulted in a curious record of achievement and considerable distortion in our understanding of the development of American manufacturing technology. The principal historical perspective that enshrined the names of Evans, Whitney, Perkins, etc. has been first, the emphasis on originality of invention or “dramatic newness,” and, secondly, the attempt by historians to confine mechanical genius or creativity within national boundaries—Slater and DuPont, of course, being the exceptions to this generalization. Thus we speak quite naturally of American inventors, British inventors, and so on.

This paper reviews the output of journal publications by the twenty five leading economic history programs during the past fifteen years. At present, there are no formal ratings of the quality of economic history programs at the various academic institutions, but journal publications can serve as a partial indicator of quality. The Roose-Andersen ratings graduate programs provide separate rankings of economics and history programs, but this information may not be appropriate in evaluating economic history programs, and the ratings have not been updated since 1969. Journal publications are certainly not the only measure of quality academic institutions, but journals are regarded as the standard outlet for disseminating new research findings and expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Those institutions that have concentrated their publication efforts on books, textbooks, monographs, working papers, and other nonjournal forms of publication will of course be underrepresented by the procedures followed in this paper.