With more than 30 million people moving to North America during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913), governments feared that Europe was losing its most talented workers. Using new data from Ireland in the early twentieth century, I provide evidence to the contrary, showing that the sons of farmers and illiterate men were more likely to emigrate than their literate and skilled counterparts. Emigration rates were highest in poorer farming communities with stronger migrant networks. I constructed these data using new name-based techniques to follow people over time and to measure chain migration from origin communities to the United States.

Why did policymakers adopt the gold standard? We first examine the political economy of Japan's adoption of the gold standard in 1897 by exploring the ex ante motives of policymakers as well as how the legislative decision to adopt gold won approval. We then show that joining the gold standard did not reduce Japanese interest rates or lead to a domestic investment boom. However, we find that membership in the gold standard increased Japan's exports by lowering transactions costs. Joining gold allowed Japan to tap into its growing share of global trade that was centered on the gold standard.

Untreated syphilis explained one-third of the higher prematurity rates of black relative to white babies born at Johns Hopkins in the early twentieth century. Differences in prematurity rates explained 41 percent of the black-white stillbirth gap and one-quarter of the black-white birth weight gap. Black babies had lower mortality and higher weight gain than white babies during the first ten days of life spent in the hospital because of higher black breast-feeding rates. Historically low birth weights may have a long reach: in 1988 maternal birth weight accounted for 5–8 percent of the gap in black-white birth weights.

We describe the transfer of patents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany using a new database containing information on 20,000 transactions. The number of transactions shows an upward trend, in total numbers and as a share of patents in force. About 8 percent of patents were transferred at least once during their existence. Many transactions involved the transfer of patents with an above-average quality from individual inventors to firms and to newly created firms. In addition, valuable patents were transferred between firms. About two-thirds of all transfers occurred during the first three years of a patents’ existence.

Economic development requires both secure property rights and the ability to reallocate property in response to technological and other changes. Significant reallocations have occurred repeatedly throughout U.S. history and have often been involuntary. This essay considers the question of how property rights can be subject to frequent involuntary reallocation and still be considered secure.

Andrew Carnegie

We use a standard metric from international finance, the currency risk premium, to assess the credibility of fixed exchange rates during the classical gold standard era. Theory suggests that a completely credible and permanent commitment to join the gold standard would have zero currency risk or no expectation of devaluation. We find that, even five years after a typical emerging-market country joined the gold standard, the currency risk premium averaged at least 220 basis points. Fixed-effects, panel-regression estimates that control for a variety of borrower-specific factors also show large and positive currency risk premia. In contrast to core gold standard countries, such as France and Germany, the persistence of large premia, long after gold standard adoption, suggest that financial markets did not view the pegs in emerging markets as credible and expected that they devaluation.

Using a new data set, this article presents new evidence on inequality in Latin America for the nineteenth century and studies the effects of factor endowments and trade on inequality. Recent research has highlighted the link between the colonial origins of inequality and its persistence in Latin America. We find that inequality varied substantially throughout the century and across the region. We identify the impact of changing factor endowments and trade on inequality using a simple theoretical framework. This work suggests that the role of initial colonial origins has been overemphasized as important changes took place during postcolonial times.

The “less-developed” interior of early modern Europe, especially the rural economy, is often regarded as financially comatose. This article investigates this view using a rich data set of marriage and death inventories for seventeenth-century Germany. It first analyzes the characteristics of debts, examining borrowing purposes, familial links, communal ties, and documentary instruments. It then explores how borrowing varied with gender, age, marital status, occupation, date, and asset portfolio. It finds that ordinary people, even in a “less-developed” economy in rural central Europe, sought to invest profitably, smooth consumption, bridge low liquidity, and hold savings in financial form.

New estimates of mean stature indicate declining heights in Northern Italy from 1730 to 1860, corroborating recent findings of a deterioration in per capita GDP and real wages—though possibly calling into question its severity. The level of heights in the 1830s is respectable in international comparison. Estimated geographic and occupational effects show the influence of the disease environment, malnutrition, and income. Declining living standards suggest a Malthusian interpretation of the economy, in which even a relatively flexible agricultural sector was not quite able to keep up with the growing pressure of population on resources.John Komlos arranged the collection of the data analyzed here and made them available to me. I am also indebted to him for ongoing discussions about anthropometrics and helpful comments on this article. I am grateful to Jörg Baten, Giovanni Federico, Paolo Malanima, Gianni Toniolo, and Vincent Tassenaar for reading and commenting on the article, and to three anonymous referees for their com-ments. An earlier version of the article was presented at the Seminar for Economic History, University of Munich.

This article develops the first comprehensive set of estimates of daily hours of work in 1880 using new data from the Census of Manufactures. We conclude that the average workday was almost exactly 10 hours in 1880—almost a decade earlier than hitherto supposed. Our statistical analysis also reveals small but statistically significant variations in hours between firms and industries, between regions, and by location. We also find that higher-paid workers probably substituted leisure for income, that total employment was unresponsive to hours, and that hours and days of employment during the year moved together.

The period 1861 to 1920 witnessed sharp price convergence in British Indian grain markets. Previous research attributed this to the construction of railways. But tests examining price differences between districts provide surprisingly weak support for that hypothesis. Railways mattered, but seem capable of explaining only about 20 percent of the decline in price dispersion. One explanation may be that India was a partially integrated economy at the time of railroad expansion. Lines connecting districts on preexisting trade routes had very small price effects. There is also some evidence of a “border effect” on lines between British India and princely states.

Big data is an exciting prospect for the field of economic history, which has long depended on the acquisition, keying, and cleaning of scarce numerical information about the past. This article examines two areas in which economic historians are already using big data – population and environment – discussing ways in which increased frequency of observation, denser samples, and smaller geographic units allow us to analyze the past with greater precision and often to track individuals, places, and phenomena across time. We also explore promising new sources of big data: organically created economic data, high resolution images, and textual corpora.

Between 1870 and 1930 production methods in American offices changed substantially as mechanical devices were introduced and work was subdivided and routinized. This paper explores connections between these technological advances and changes in clerical emplyment, particularly the employment of women in offices. A close correspondence is found between the timing of changes in the sex composition of clerical employment and the adoption of new techniques. It is argued that the new technology led to increased hiring of female clerical workers by reducing the form-specific skill requirements for clerical jobs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine cost-of-living differences among the various regions of the United States during a thirty-year interval of the nineteenth century. We do this by constructing regional price indexes for the years 1851–1880 using two different base years for pur calculations, 1860 and 1880. The results indicate that the cost of living differed substantially among regions, and specifically that it was lower in the American Midwest than in the East. Although one might have expected these differences among regions to narrow as regional and national markets developed and improved, we find no evidence that they did during this thirty-year period.

The decades of the 1820's, 1830's and early 1840's form a fascinating period i n the process of American nineteenth-century development. In many ways that era represents a classic case of interdependence between developed and underdeveloped economies through the movements of factors, goods and specie. During these formative years in American development, the United States was predominantly a single primary product exporter, her rate of economic expansion very much a function of the state of the external market for cotton. The flow of capital moves in the classic fashion, from capital-rich Great Britain to capital-scarce America, but varying with relative degrees of expected returns; that is, varying with the relative rate of development between the two countries. But the period from the 1820's to 1840's exhibits another interesting aspect as well: it reveals the first substantial evidence of a long swing in the rate of American economic development.

Several accounts have documented the difficult employment experiences of immigrants in manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century. A recent quantitative study, however, has asserted that wage differentials between immigrants and natives were the result of differences in skill, and not discrimination. We examine the same data on a less aggregative level, and our regression analysis indicates that the so-called “new” immigrants received lower wages than either “old” immigrants or natives—even after standardizing for worker skills and industry characteristics. An analysis of a second data set confirms the finding of discrimination.

This article presents a quantitative analysis of the geographic distribution of spending through the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA). Using newly assembled state- and county-level data, the results show that the Johnson administration directed funding in ways consistent with the War on Poverty's rhetoric of fighting poverty and racial discrimination: poorer areas and those with a greater share of nonwhite residents received systematically more funding. In contrast to New Deal spending, political variables explain very little of the variation in EOA funding. The smaller role of politics may help explain the strong backlash against the War on Poverty's programs.

The article sketches the history of Swedish commercial banking from 1656 until World War I, with special attention to the post-1850 period. Emphasis is placed on the relationships between economic growth and banking. International comparisons based on the quantitative measures developed by Rondo Cameron and Raymond Goldsmith are made. It is concluded that at all stages of its early industrialization Sweden had a remarkably large and efficient banking system. This, in turn, was largely the result of the general population's long experience with banking and paper money and their generally high levels of literacy and education.

The use of steam power in manufacturing has long been recognized as an important part of the English industrial revolution, but in studies of the United States the role of the steam engine in manufacturing has been overshadowed by its application in railroads. This paper attempts partially to redress the balance by examining the use of stationary steam engines in America about 1840. Section I explores the characteristics of the supply of stationary engines in America, contrasting the engines used in America with those used in Britain. Section II discusses the demand for steam engines, that is, the factors underlying the choice between steam and waterpower in different industries.

The market for joint stock shares in eighteenth-century England is often portrayed as an underdeveloped and flawed mechanism for resource allocation, which in turn is cited to explain the paucity of shares actually traded. This article questions that interpretation, both by inquiring whether the requisite institutions for a functional market were present, and by constructing a new time series of eighteenth-century share prices and exposing them to a test of the efficient markets hypothesis. Because the stock exchange is found to exhibit most of the conventionally defined characteristics of an effective market, the article concludes by outlining the case for skepticism with respect to a common theme in economic history: the idea that the purported superiority of market resource allocation over alternative non-market forms (in the absence of rigidities due to underdevelopment or government interference) is an unambiguous conclusion in every historical context.