For long periods, and in line with recent theoretical literature, the rabassa morta sharecropping contract successfully reduced problems of moral hazard and opportunistic behavior, and provided incentives for sharecroppers to respond to market opportunities. However, from the late nineteenth century, technical change, rising wages, and weak wine prices all increased the incentives for postcontractual opportunistic behavior on the part of the sharecropper, leading to conflicts and loss of trust between the principal and agent.

On December 5, 1910, the Immigration Commission presented its voluminous report to the Congress. Though the report covered a multitude of topics, a central theme was that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were earning less than the “old” immigrants from northwestern Europe because the newcomers were willing to accept a lower standard of living. “They were,” the commission concluded, “content to accept wages and conditions which the native American and immigrants of the older class had come to regard as unsatisfactory.” The discovery of such “unfair competition,” along with its other findings, led the commission to recommend legislation restricting the admission of the “new” immigrant groups, and subsequently the immigration laws of 1917, 1921, and 1924 implemented this recommendation.

This study estimates the size of the so-called “informal,” or unintermediated, credit market in one Swedish city through a period of economic transformation. In the early 1840s promissory notes accounted for more than half of the total credit market, and almost four times the value of credit channeled through the banking system. Even in the 1870s, the promissory-note market was twice the size of the loan volume of the banking system. By 1905 bank-based credit had finally surpassed the informal variety; but even then, outstanding promissory notes were almost three-fifths as great as total bank credits to noncorporate borrowers.

To estimate the impact of federal spending on state incomes, we develop an annual panel data set between 1930 and 1940. Using panel methods we estimate that an added dollar of federal spending in the state increased state per capita income by between 40 and 96 cents. The point estimates for nonfarm grants are higher and for AAA farm grants are much smaller and negative in some cases. The spending led to increase in durable good spending on automobiles but had no positive effects on private employment.

During Amsterdam's development as the commercial center of Europe in the seventeenth century, an informal “information exchange” appeared among the economic and political institutions of the city. Informational economies of the types discussed by Stigler, North, and Pred led to the emergence of Amsterdam as the focal point of information flows throughout Europe. They also encouraged a high level of innovation within all functional areas of Amsterdam's information exchange—especially in long-term data analysis—which contributed to the general modernization of capitalism.

The gap between the mean wages of black men and white men in the United States narrowed substantially between 1940 and 1950. There was, however, almost no change in this wage gap between 1950 and 1960. Some of this discontinuity in the path of black progress can be explained by general changes in the wage structure—wage compression in the 1940s and slight expansion in the 1950s. However, most of the gains of the 1940s were driven by race-specific factors, including increasing relative wages controlling for worker characteristics. These race-specific gains ceased in the 1950s.

Changes in formal institutions do not always affect economic outcomes. When an industry has specific technological features that limit a government's ability to expropriate it, or when the industry is able to call on foreign governments to enforce its de facto property rights, economic agents can easily mitigate changes in formal institutions designed to reduce these property rights. We explore the Mexican oil industry from 1911 to 1929 and demonstrate that informal rather than formal institutions were key, permitting oil companies to coordinate their responses to increases in taxes or the redefinition of their de jure property rights.

Could the Federal Reserve have reversed the decline in the money supply during the Great Depression without causing a loss of confidence in the U.S. commitment to the gold standard? This article uses the $1 billion expansionary open market operation in 1932 as a crucial case study. Using forward exchange rates and interest rate differentials to measure devaluation expectations, we find virtually no evidence that the large monetary expansion led investors to believe that the United States would devalue. The financial press and Federal Reserve records also show scant evidence of expectations of devaluation or fear of speculative attack.

We develop a compromise estimate of the German Net National Product for the years 1851–1913 based on four estimates from Hoffmann (1965) and Hoffmann and Müller (1959) by recalculating industrial production, investment, home and foreign capital income. Because differences remain during the early decades, we compute a weighted average compromise series. Economic activity is shown to be higher than the older estimates suggest. The average growth rate is lower. The average business cycle lasted five years, with high volatility in the early decades. The typical Gründerzeit pattern of boom then prolonged recession after 1873 can not be confirmed.

From 1930 to 1960 rural communities, mainly in the U.S. South and Southwest, gained access to electricity. In addition to lights, the benefits included easier clothes washing, refrigeration, and pumped water. This article uses differences in the timing of electricity access across rural counties to study the effects on infant mortality and fertility. Rural electrification led to substantial reductions in infant mortality but had little effect on women's fertility. The increase in electricity access between 1930 and 1960 can account for 15 to 19 percent of the decline in rural infant mortality during this period.

Although coal companies may have tried to exploit a local-store monopoly, company-store prices in nonunion areas were appreciably limited by competition from other stores and mines in the same labor market. Company stores persisted in part by lowering transactions costs. Prices at company stores were generally similar to those at nearby independent stores, and higher wages may have compensated for higher store prices at isolated mines. Conditions varied, however, with labor-market tightness. Miners were generally not in debt to the store, nor paid entirely in scrip. Scrip was an advance on payday, when miners received cash.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s southern landlords began to replace sharetenants and mules with wage laborers and large-scale preharvest machinery. Informed observers in the 1920s did not expect this to happen until the advent of the mechanical cotton picker, which came after World War I. This paper presents evidence supporting the claim that the AAA policies of the 1930s, and the economic depression they were designed to cure, induced this tenant displacement by increasing the asset value of land rights without securing tenants a share right, and by relaxing the harvest labor constraint that had previously impeded mechanization.

The opening of the Suez Canal took place in a century crowded revolutionary changes in the shipping world. In sharp contrast to the slow pace of change and development in the preceding era, major changes occurred in almost every sector of the shipping industry in the nineteenth century. While many of the new departures can be explained, at least in part, by the application of the techniques of the Industrial Revolution to shipping, the opening of Suez went far to accelerate and give direction to these changes. The canal significantly altered shipbuilding techniques and practices and contributed to the precipitous decline in the importance of the sailing ship as a major world carrier. Suez helped to bring about die realignment and relative decline of the European entrepot trade. And the new channel led to significant shifts in the patterns of Eastern and Australasian trade.

Historians of the period have generally played down the debasement of France's coinage to increase crown revenues during the Hundred Years' War or treated it as a last resort and an inept one. Based on archival data and an analytical framework drawn from the modern literature on inflation tax, this article supports challengers of that view, showing that debasement was an effective instrument of public finance.

Sectors of the English economy recognized as technological leaders have records of accelerated patent activity soon after 1760. But the patent record also reveals considerable inventive activity during the same period in industries not normally associated with advancing technology. It is therefore unlikely that there was a “leading technological sector.” The widespread increase in patenting is consistent with macroeconomic causes of accelerated invention.

We use a new trade dataset showing that nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom comparable to other parts of the “global periphery.” A sharp rise in export prices in the five decades before the scramble (1835–1885) was followed by an equally impressive decline during the colonial era. This study revises the view that the scramble for West Africa occurred when its major export markets were in decline and argues that the larger weight of West Africa in French imperial trade strengthened the rationale for French instead of British initiative in the conquest of the interior.

This article re-examines the secular improvement in human heights in France. Adult heights reflect consumption as children, so the distribution of resources between children and adults, determined primarily within households, should have influenced heights. The intrahousehold distribution of resources was influenced by the level of income and by the calorie demands of working adults. Results show that the early decline of marital fertility in France was accompanied by a small but significant increase in expenditures on child quality as measured by heights. Reductions in mortality, independent of the level of food intake, also contributed to improved heights.

The first formal meeting of the Economic History Association after This death should not close without appropriate tribute to our initial president and the first real American economic historian, Edwin F. Gay. More than most members of the Association, I feel his loss, since in one capacity or another I had the good fortune to be associated with him for almost thirty-five years. And I am the more appropriate agent to render our common tribute, since, more than others, I am indebted to him. I realize that, without his instruction, encouragement, and stimulation, I should not be standing here as a successor to him in office.

Throughout the world for most of the nineteenth century cane sugar was produced on plantations, most frequently with either slave labor or, after slavery was ended, with contract laborers brought in from other low-income countries. This paper details the diverse sources and recipients of nineteenth-century contract labor movements, relating them to political and economic factors. Shifts in the ethnic composition of the plantation labor force are indicated. Late nineteenth- century transitions in the nature of sugar production are noted, and questions raised about their implications for the study of the relations between institutional and technological changes.