Expropriation of private property by government is seldom found on the list of policies which have influenced the course of economic development in American history. To be sure, the once-vigorous myth of antebellum laisser-faire has been discarded; and it is no longer taken as a startling proposition that governmental interventions to promote and regulate the economy occurred regularly throughout the nineteenth century. But for two reasons, I think, expropriation as an instrument of conscious resource allocation has failed to receive from historians the attention it deserves.

The frequency of bad harvests and price elasticity of demand are measured using new data on English grain yields 1268–1480 and 1750–1850 and a revised price series. The analysis shows that major harvest shortfalls were a significant component of most historical subsistence crises, as back-to-back shortfalls were of the worst famines. Although serious harvest shortfalls long remained an unavoidable fact of economic life, by c.1800 yields had become less variable and prices less harvest sensitive. By the eve of the Industrial Revolution, England had become effectively famine-free.

The commonly accepted chronology for comparative productivity levels, based on GDP data, does not apply to the manufacturing sector, which shows evidence of a much greater degree of stationarity of comparative labor productivity performance among the major industrialized countries of Britain, Germany, and the United States. These results for manufacturing suggest that convergence of GDP per worker must have occurred through trends in other sectors and through compositional effects of structural change. The persistent, large labor productivity gap between the United States and Europe cannot be explained simply by differences in capital per worker, but is related to technological choice.

This article examines a government-sponsored cartel that fixed domestic crude oil prices in interstate markets from 1933 through 1972. Although the cartel raised and stabilized nominal oil prices beyond earlier private efforts, it also resulted in politically driven constraints on price, output levels, and cartel rent distribution. Political factors molded quota assignments, diverted production from low- to high-cost producers, and raised production costs. Political pressures prevented Texas from acting as a residual or swing producer. Instead, the interstate oil cartel members maintained nominal prices and spread the political costs of output adjustments.

This article examines the determinants of emigration from post-Famine Ireland. As Irish real wages rose relative to those in destination countries, the emigration rate fell. We argue, from time series analysis, that much of the secular fall in the rate can be explained by that narrowing of the wage gap. County-level, cross-sectional analysis of emigration rates indicates that poverty and low wages, large family size, and limited opportunities to acquire smallholdings all contributed to high rates of emigration. Changes in those variables over time reflect the rise in living standards, consistent with time series evidence.

The money stock in France from 1493 to 1680 has not been well understood. Changes in the money stock have usually been represented by moving sums of annual mint output. Mint output, however, included large amounts of recoinage, resulting in double-counting. A model of mint output is estimated to determine the amount of recoinage. The money stock estimates are also improved by incorporating a constant rate of loss of coins.

During the nineteenth century, under free labor market contracting, apprenticeship persisted in Britain but declined in the United States. This article argues that apprenticeship endured in Britain because of its efficiency advantages and because of customs, inherited from the guilds, that favored training certification for entry into skilled jobs. By contrast, within the United States guild traditions were weaker, occupational certification was seldom required, and, as a result, indenture obligations were hard to enforce. Understandably, U.S. employers refrained from making training investments in potentially mobile apprentices.

Over time, international trade expanded beyond the reach of an individual's personal networks. How was long-distance trade among strangers financed without using banks? I argue that the joint liability rule enabled the medieval bill of exchange to become a major form of payment and credit in the early modern period which in turn supported an unparalleled expansion of trade. This article empirically examines the role that joint liability played in ameliorating fundamental information problems in long-distance trade finance.

Nineteenth-century Italy experienced the long swings in migration, capital flows, and construction characteristic of the international Kuznets cycle, but in an unusual combination: its external migration swing may have resembled Britain's, but its capital flows and construction swing resembled America's. Construction in Italy was finance-sensitive rather than population-sensitive, and reacted primarily to exogenous shifts in the supply of foreign capital. The Italian experience suggests that changes in perceived risk altered the relative supply of capital in Britain and abroad and thereby induced the opposite swings in construction and the swing in migration.

Analysis of the spatial pattern of prices and output in the manuscript returns of the French agricultural census of 1852 indicates that the availability of market outlets was probably the dominant factor determining the rise in agricultural productivity prior to the mid-nineteenth century and that agricultural supply was probably price elastic. The belief that the period of the industrial revolution was one of inelastic agricultural supply is shown to rest on a misinterpretation of the extant data on agricultural prices.

I find that childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, adversely impacted later-life human capital—especially when exposure was in utero—increasing poverty and disability rates, and decreasing fertility and college completion rates. The event's devastation of agriculture, however, had the beneficial effect of increasing high school completion, likely by pushing children who otherwise might have worked on the farm into secondary schooling. Lastly, New Deal spending helped remediate Dust Bowl damage, suggesting that timely and substantial policy interventions can aid in human recovery from natural disasters.

This paper examines the five-dollar day compensation policy instituted by the Ford Motor Company in 1914 in light of recent developments in wage-determination theory. The new wage was above the opportunity cost of the labor employed. Yet various efficiency wage theories, by which high wages increase output, are shown to provide an implausible explanation. The particular (and epochal) technical change that occurred at Ford and the attitudes and beliefs of relevant actors suggest instead a rent-sharing theory driven by the threat of collective action by labor. This confluence, not the money, marks the episode as a watershed.

The existence of property rights affects the allocation and distribution of economic resources. The exclusive rights to ownership and control over assets leads to a different level and pattern of economic activity than would occur if these assets remained unowned or “common property.” While property rights are frequently subject to various constraints imposed by law or custom, within these bounds owners are free to use their resources to achieve their desired ends. Resources may be sold in an exchange of property rights, rented for a specified time period in exchange for some quid pro quo, or employed (or kept idle) by the owner himself. The owner's welfare function will include the income (or other utility) derived from use of the resource, while, for purposes of measuring national income, the final consumption of the entire population would be included.

Cameroon was partitioned between France and the United Kingdom after WWI and then reunited after independence. I use this natural experiment to investigate colonial legacies in education, using a border discontinuity analysis of historical census microdata from 1976. I find that men born in the decades following partition had, all else equal, one more year of schooling if they were born in the British part. This positive British effect disappeared after 1950, as the French increased education expenditure, and because of favoritism in school supply towards the Francophone side after reunification. Using 2005 census microdata, I find that the British advantage resurfaced more recently: Cameroonians born after 1970 are more likely to finish high school, attend a university, and have a high-skilled occupation if they were born in the former British part. I explain this result by the legacy of high grade repetition rates in the French-speaking education system and their detrimental effect on dropout.

The Baring Crisis is the nineteenth century's most famous sovereign debt crisis. Using a database of more than 15,000 observations, we assess its effect on emerging market borrowers and find empirical evidence of a regional crisis but not a global crisis. During the crisis, Latin American yield spreads increased by more than 200 basis points relative to the rest of the world, even after controlling for macroeconomic, trade, political-institutional factors, and other country-specific effects. Our evidence suggests that European investors may have sold off or reduced their holdings of Latin American securities in the wake of the Baring Crisis.

Douglass North and Robert Thomas recently proposed a model of the rise and fall of the manorial system. There is much to be admired in this work, which explores an unusually broad historical vision with great analytical acumen; but my purpose here is to examine some of its less compelling features. In section II, I consider the nature of feudalism, and develop empirical arguments against the wholly voluntaristic and non-exploitative interpretation proposed by North and Thomas. Section III examines their analysis of the “classic” manor, which I believe errs both in limiting the feasible contracts to forms of direct barter and in attributing the lowest transaction costs to labor dues even within that restricted set. Section IV reviews the proposed explanation of the later evolution of the manorial system, disputing both the continued use of the transaction costs model and the extensions of it that consider custom as an institutional barrier to efficiency, and population growth and inflation as the exogenous motors of change. Section V provides a brief concluding summary and evaluation.

This article explores wealth accumulation among European immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1840 and 1850. It uses a new sample of immigrants linked from passenger-ship records to the 1850 and 1860 federal census manuscripts. These immigrants rapidly accumulated real and personal wealth. Their real wealth grew 10 percent with each year≈s residence in the United States. This was not because immigrants arriving in the early 1840s were wealthier at arrival than later arrivals, nor was the rapid accumulation of wealth confined to one nationality or occupation. Rather, it reflects these immigrants≈ abilities to adapt to new circumstances after their arrival.

Since the triumph of a business culture a century and half ago the businessman has been scorned, and so the phrase “bourgeois virtue” sounds like an oxymoron. Economists since Bentham have believed that anyway virtue is beside the point: what matters for explanation is Prudence. But this is false in many circumstances, even strictly economic circumstances. An economic history that insists on Prudence Alone is misspecified, and will produce biased coefficients. And it will not face candidly the central task of economic history, an apology for or a criticism of a bourgeois society.

Any attempt to discuss the way in which railroads have promoted the rise of the American economy must assume some theory of economic evolution. The following analysis is based upon Schumpeter's theory of innovations. Briefly this theory holds that economic evolution in capitalistic society is started by innovation in some production function, that is, by new combinations of the factors in the economic process. These innovations may center in new commodities or new services, new types of machinery, new forms of organization, new firms, new resources, or new areas. As Schumpeter makes clear, this is not a general theory of economic, much less of social, change. Innovation is an internal factor operating within a given economic system while the system is also affected by external factors (many of them sociological) and by growth (which means, substantially, changes in population and in the sum total of savings made by individuals and firms). These sets of factors interact in economic change. “The changes in the economic process brought about by innovation, together with all their effects, and the response to them by the economic system” constitute economic evolution for Schumpeter.

This study provides an empirical test of North and Weingast's theory of British capital-market development after the Glorious Revolution. The evidence is consistent with the hypotheses that institutional innovation in the 1690s led to the dramatic growth in London capital markets, and that threats to these institutions caused financial turmoil. We also find the economic motivation for these innovations to be consistent with the work of Ekelund and Tollison.