We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on mortality and economic activity across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The combination of fast and stringent NPIs reduced peak mortality by 50 percent and cumulative excess mortality by 24 to 34 percent. However, while the pandemic itself was associated with short-run economic disruptions, we find that these disruptions were similar across cities with strict and lenient NPIs. NPIs also did not worsen medium-run economic outcomes. Our findings indicate that NPIs can reduce disease transmission without further depressing economic activity, a finding also reflected in discussions in contemporary newspapers.

This article uses evidence from the manuscripts of the 1860 federal census to analyze the wealth of adult males in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Indianapolis. Previous multivariate analyses of wealth from the census have been flawed by reliance on ordinary least squares; we instead use quantile regression. Immigrants fared considerably better in the Midwest than the East: immigrants in the midwestern cities held more wealth than their eastern counterparts, both absolutely and relative to the native-born in their respective cities. We explore the causes of these differences and their consequences for nineteenth-century Americans and their communities.

Understanding the political impact of economic growth requires knowledge of the timing of structural changes within a national economy. The decline of agriculture's share in the national economy and variations in regional economic structures are of particular importance. The corrected figures on farm employment discussed in Section II indicate that between 1861 and 1907 the share of agriculture in national employment in Germany declined considerably more rapidly than appears in the census results; regional shares also tended to diverge from each other and from the average throughout the period. New international competition and the thrust of urban and industrial development required regional readjustments within German agriculture. They also made it progressively more difficult for agricultural regions to compete for resources and markets without outside help. In the absence of internally generated pressure from commerce and industry, the elite in the eastern regions of Prussia opposed outside help whenever it threatened the local economic structure. The result was to increase the dependence of the region's labor for jobs on relatively declining regional industry. The response of the landowners to these changes in turn strongly influenced national political groupings. The whole experience laid a foundation for the reaction in German political life to the social discontents and economic miseries of the First World War and decades following.

Today, German machine toolmakers accuse their Chinese competitors of violating patent rights and imitating German technology. A century ago, German machine toolmakers used the same methods to imitate American technology. To understand the dynamics of this catching-up process, we use patent statistics to analyze firms’ activities between 1877 and 1932. We show that German firms deployed imitating strategies in the late nineteenth century and the 1920s to catch-up to their American competitors. The German administration supported this strategy by stipulating a patent law that discriminated against foreign patent holders and by delaying the granting of patents to foreign applicants.

In the late nineteenth century, when most of the world was on a gold standard, India was on a silver standard. Silver was used for coins, held in hoards, and worn as jewelry. Regression analysis confirms a positive relationship between prices and the money supply, and inverse relationships between prices and rainfall and prices and the combined influences of railroads and commercialization. The. influx of silver was not correlated with the money supply, apparently because hoarding and dishoarding by peasants and others caused the amount of money in active circulation to vary.

This study documents the boom in Europe's imports from Asia and the Americas between 1500 and 1800 and explores its causes. There was no commodity-price convergence between continents, suggesting that declining trade barriers were not the cause of the boom. Thus, it must have been caused by some combination of European import demand and foreign export supply. The behavior of the relative price of foreign importables in European cities should tell us which mattered most and when: we provide the evidence and offer a model which is used to decompose the sources of Europe's overseas trade boom.

Weaknesses within the check-clearing system played a hitherto unrecognized role in the banking crises of the Great Depression. Correspondent check-clearing networks were vulnerable to counter-party cascades. Accounting conventions that overstated reserves available to corresponding institutions may have exacerbated the situation. The initial banking panic began when a correspondent network centered in Nashville collapsed, forcing over 100 institutions to suspend operations. As the contraction continued, additional correspondent systems imploded. The vulnerability of correspondent networks is one reason that banks that cleared via correspondents failed at higher rates than other institutions during the Great Depression.

In nineteenth century Britain atmospheric pollution from coal-fired industrialization was on the order of 50 times higher than today. We examine the effects of these emissions on child development by analysing the heights on enlistment during WWI of men born in England and Wales in the 1890s. We find a strong negative relationship between adult heights and the coal intensity of the districts in which these men were observed as children in the 1901 census. The subsequent decline in atmospheric pollution likely contributed to the long-term improvement in health and increase in height.

This article aims to cover an important aspect of the economic history of Porfirian Mexico: the integration of agricultural domestic markets. Because corn was the staple crop of the commercial agricultural sector, it becomes the protagonist of this story. Panel techniques are applied to a price-convergence model. Although still unfinished on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, corn market integration substantially accelerated during the Porfiriato and ended up further integrated than estimated by Kuntz. Railroads were not only indispensable to the economic growth of Mexico, but also played a key role in the process of corn market integration.

Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is the cause of high machinery investment or that a high rate of machinery investment is a good proxy for other factors that are important causes of growth.

Research into sculture and entrepreneurship in Britain has been dominated by casual empiricism. This article shows the benefits of using a new method. Lifetime wealth accumulation is specified as a measure of entrepreneurial performance, and applied to data collected from dictionaries of business biography. Industry, region, and religious dissent are ruled out as explanations of entrepreneurial performance. Education and entrepreneurial type are the important predictors. Firm inheritors and those receiving a high-status education experienced relatively low lifetime rates of wealth accumulation. Firm founders, managers, and individuals with a lower-status education were comparatively successful.

The henequen boom coincided with the rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). During the boom, many Maya in Yucatan lost their rights to land and moved to henequen haciendas. As part of the implicit contract with hacendados, peons accumulated large debts at the time of marriage, most of which were never repaid. We argue that the debts bound workers to the hacienda as part of a system of paternalism and that more productive workers incurred more debt. We examine the institutional setting in which debt operated and stress the formal and informal institutional contexts within which hacendados and workers negotiated contracts.

John Kenneth Turner1

Historians of slavery and the slave trade have often left us with the impression that the slave trade was fantastically profitable. The view that it was the profits from the slave trade which financed the British Industrial Revolution and the first industrialization of the United States appears to be gaining adherents. These interpretations seem plausible enough on the surface; indeed, the latter provides part of the historical foundation for the claim by black militants for reparations. Black slaves, whether shipped directly from Africa, or born in the New World into slavery, served their masters against their wills in return for the subsistence allowed them. Surely there was a substantial difference between the value of what they produced and the value of the consumption goods allotted to them to allow survival.

Tontine insurance, introduced in 1868, combined the features of life insurance with an unusual old-age saving plan. A portion of the annual premium was accumulated in a fund that was divided among the surviving policyholders after twenty years. By 1905, two-thirds of all life insurance in force was of this type. Despite consumer appeal, sales of tontine policies were prohibited in 1906 after the Armstrong Investigation charged the tontine business with corruption and extravagance. We argue that tontine insurance was actuarially sound and an attractive life-cycle investment. Prohibition was probably unnecessary.

Single women dominated the U.S. female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of single women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of their earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task-oriented and payment was frequently by the piece. Earnings rose steeply with experience and peaked early; learning was mainly on-the-job. Occupational segregation by sex was a partial product of the method of payment, and the early termination of human capital investment was a function of the life-cycle labor force participation of these women, although the role of the family was also critical.

Few generalizations find wider acceptance among specialists onChina than that which holds that the Chinese Imperial Government was hostile to commerce and industry and that this hostility was a major element in the country's failure to achieve modern economic growth. There is, of course, an important element of truth in this generalization, but analysis of the issues involved has generally suffered from a failure to make clear just what it was that the Chinese government in the nineteenth century should have done to promote development.

We present new estimates of the British industrial unemployment rate for 1870–1913, which improve on the Board of Trade's prior estimates. We use similar sources, but our series includes additional industrial sectors, allows for short-time working, and aggregates the various sectors using appropriate labor-force weights from the census. The resulting index suggests a rate of industrial unemployment that was generally higher, but less volatile, than the board's index. We then adjust our series to an economywide basis, and construct a consistent time series of overall unemployment for 1870–1999.

This article examines the Crusade against outrelief to determine why poor law unions endorsed it. Although initiated by the central government, the Crusade could reduce union costs because very few of those denied outrelief would enter the workhouse. As the tax burden on wealthier and more influential ratepayers rose, guardians had more interest in cutting expenditure. An increase in effective rateable value permitted improvement of workhouse facilities and the restriction of outrelief, even to the deserving poor.

Progressive-Era reformers claimed typhoid, a waterborne disease, was more prevalent in cities with private water companies than in cities with public water companies. This article tests this claim for the 1880 to 1920 period. The evidence suggests private companies invested in water filters more often than public companies, and that switching from private to public provision of water did little to improve typhoid rates.