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.

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.

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.

Loan repudiations and property confiscations were common between medieval kings and individuals. Traditional accounts of these confiscations focus on factors affecting the kings, ignoring the motivations of the victims. This deficiency may be remedied by considering the problems faced on both sides of any agreement between a king and a group of citizens. A model is presented which explains the timing and the form of repudiations and confiscations without resorting to an assumption of irrationality by either party. It is general enough to address a persistent problem in the property rights view of government: How can an individual protect himself from abuses by his protector?

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.

This article analyses a new series of prices and wages stretching back to 1827 for the provinces of the Habsburg Empire. These real wage series are the first continuous and consistent indicator of changing living standards in this part of Europe during industrialization. They show that while the living standards stagnated throughout the monarchy prior to 1850s, the West (unlike the East) was able to launch onto a path of continuous growth in the second half of the century. The empire experienced little convergence onto the living standards of its neighbors and even internally the convergence record is mixed.

The relative dynamism of English and Scottish foreign trade from 1675 to 1775 can largely be explained by the interrelated phenomena of the growing domestic demand for American and Asian consumer goods and North European raw materials; the growing market in northern and western Europe for re-exports of American and Asian consumables; and the growing protected market for British manufactures in the American colonies and Africa. Trade growth depended on development of a wide variety of credit practices, supported primarily by big wholesalers and export merchants. Wholesalers and merchants also accounted for important institutional innovations.

Carefully constructed but fallible historical estimates of GDP and agricultural output inform our understanding of the preindustrial origins of economic growth. Here we review four recent attempts at estimating agricultural output and food availability in England and Wales at different points between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. We highlight their contrasting implications for trends in well-being and nutritional status over time. Building on these estimates, we propose our own tentative, compromise estimate of food availability. The compromise estimates are more coherent with our understanding of conditions before and during the Industrial Revolution.

I use new data on employment and job placements during WWII to characterize the wartime surge in female work and its subsequent impact on female employment in the United States. The geography of female wartime work was primarily driven by industrial mobilization, not drafted men’s withdrawal from local labor markets. After the war, returning veterans and sharp cutbacks in war-related industries displaced many new female entrants, despite interest in continued work. As a result, areas most exposed to wartime work show limited overall effects on female labor force participation in 1950 and only marginal increases in durables manufacturing employment.

The steel industry of Wilhelminian Germany is especially known for its tariff protection; its anti-competitive collusion, and the rapid increases of its productivity and its output. This study analyzes the interdependence of these four phenomena. The tariffs and cartels were directly symbiotic in providing protection, which had substantial redistributive effects in favor of larger firms. The restriction of competition by tariffs and cartels may have contributed to the productivity advances of the German steel industry by reducing the riskiness of capital-intensive technologies. Productivity increases made a major contribution to the industry's growth.

Women engaged primarily in the provision of domestic services for family members make important contributions to total output. This article provides estimates of the size and sectoral allocation of the nonmarket household work force in the United States between 1800 and 1860. Those estimates are then used as a basis for several alternative imputations of the value of these women's work, which modify the historical picture of economic growth over this period.

A literature has developed recently to analyze the disruptive effects on small, open economies of a sudden change in the value of their natural resources. The paper looks to that literature to explain the effect on the Australian colonies of the discovery of substantial gold deposits in the 1850s. The price and quantity adjustments predicted by the model are found to be well supported by the historical experience with one important exception. Immigration played a far greater role in the Australian case than has been suggested in the theoretical literature. The model does, however, allow for a compact description of the confusing decade in Australian history and explains a number of previously unconnected phenomena.

The introduction of segregation laws for municipal streetcars is examined. The economics of private and public segregation is analyzed first, taking note of the particular features of the streetcar industry, followed by a discussion of the contemporary debates on streetcar segregation laws in a number of southern cities. The evidence presented suggests that segregation laws were binding constraints and not simply the codification of customary practice. Furthermore, the streetcar companies were not the initiators of segregation and sometimes actively resisted it. These findings are related to several major interpretations of the origins of segregation.

The concentration of business enterprise in corporate structures at the end of the last century called the attention of scholars to the history of the business corporation, the chartered joint-stock company. Even those who agreed that “the honour of originally inventing these political constitutions entirely belongs to the Romans” realized that their modern economic functions were relatively recent and demanded explanation. In this country, Williston's brilliant essay, the studies of Simeon Baldwin, and a number of other investigations probed into the origin and nature of the institution at about the period when it became a pressing social issue.

U.S corn output increased from 1.8 billion bushels in 1879 to 12.7 billion bushels in 2007. Concurrently, the footprint of production changed substantially. Failure to take proper account of movements means that productivity assessments likely misattribute sources of growth and climate change studies likely overestimate impacts. Our new spatial output indexes show that 16 to 21 percent of the increase in U.S. corn output over the 128 years beginning in 1879 was attributable to spatial movement in production. This long-run perspective provides historical precedent for how much agriculture might adjust to future changes in climate and technology.

The technological backwardness of the British cotton industry in the first six decades of this century was due primarily to the structure of industrial organization, characterized by intense competition and specialization, that had developed in the nineteenth century when the industry had no serious international competitors. But with the rise of corporate economies, particularly in Japan and the United States, this structure of industrial organization rendered British cotton managers powerless to create the corporate structures required to meet this challenge. Britain's decline was due to the failure of its managers to create conditions for new profitable opportunities by altering the constraints that they faced.

A number of hypotheses attempt to disentangle the “true” causes of the Panic of 1837 from domestic and international factors that came into play as the crisis approached. I analyze U.S. government documents and contemporary newspapers to reconsider the role of domestic factors. These sources place neither the official distribution of the federal surplus nor an international shock at the center. Rather, a series of interbank transfers of government balances and a policy-induced increase in the demand for coin in the Western states drained the largest New York City banks of their specie reserves and rendered the panic inevitable.

This article uses 1937 and 1940 Census data to estimate the effect that hiring an additional relief worker in a county had on unemployment statistics for that county. The fundamental estimation problem arises because one cannot easily control for economic conditions that influenced both the number of individuals holding relief jobs and the number counted as jobless.