Explanations for the recent decline in the labor force attachment of males 65 years of age and older include the introduction of Old Age and Survivors Insurance and the growth in private pension programs. Neither hypothesis can explain the sizable decline that occurred between 1930 and 1950, when aggregate social security and private pension payments were small. Estimates from pooled state aggregate data indicate that the means-tested Old Age Assistance program established by the Social Security Act of 1935 significantly increased retirement activity in this period, particularly among low-income individuals.

We estimate a threshold autoregressive model to assess medieval financial integration. Our approach is based on the analysis of deviations between exchange rates and parity, which in a fully integrated market should not exceed bullion points. Hence, the time needed for adjustment, following a violation of the bullion points, is a measure of integration. We apply this approach to exchange between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders, Lübeck, and Prussia, results showing that whereas it took about eight months to reduce deviations between Flanders and Lübeck by 50 percent, those between Flanders and Prussia were roughly twice as persistent.

This article uses evidence drawn from the manuscripts of the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses to investigate the correlates of the wealth of adult males in Chicago. The analysis reveals rapidly increasing wealth with age, a substantial positive effect on wealth of duration of residence in the city, and an absence of any significant impact of nativity on wealth when controlling occupation. Mean wealth rose from well below the national average in 1850 to a level far above the national average in 1860. Together these results suggest that early Chicago was a place of exceptional economic opportunity for settlers.

This article illustrates the impact of Jewish lenders on private credit markets and public finance in medieval and Renaissance Italian towns. In Tuscan private credit markets, Jewish lending helped households to smooth consumption, buy working capital, and provide dowries for daughters. Jewish lenders also helped the public fmances of the communes in which they resided. This article shows that public-finance considerations affected the choice of the interest-rate ceiling Jews were allowed to charge. In many instances, the communes raised the interest-rate ceiling for Jewish lenders in order to tax or borrow the proceeds.

The pendulum of scholarship has swung too far towards the position that the profits from slaving were small. Thomas and Bean in concept and Anstey and Richardson in practice have reckoned them too small. The detailed accounts of several dozen ventures in the late eighteenth century show that the trade was difficult to enter, dominated by a few large merchants, and subject to long runs of high “short-run” profits, as in 1779–1788: The best firms earned upwards of 50 percent on their investments, well above the normal profits of an easy trade.

The First World War radically altered the political landscape of Central Europe. The new borders after 1918 are typically viewed as detrimental to the region's economic integration and development. We argue that this view lacks historical perspective. It fails to take into account that the new borders followed a pattern of economic fragmentation that had emerged during the late nineteenth century. We estimate the effects of the new borders on trade and find that the “treatment effects” of these borders were quite limited. There is strong evidence that border changes occurred systematically along barriers which existed already before 1914.

Wars in early modern times, although frequent, generated little price inflation because of their limited demands on real resources. The invention of paper currency and the resort to deficit financing to pay for wars changed that situation. In recent centuries wars have been the principal causes of inflation, although since World War II programs of social welfare unmatched by offsetting taxation have also fueled inflationary flames.

There are currently two ways of estimating relative levels of per capita income back to the nineteenth century. The most commonly adopted approach, popularized in particular by Angus Maddison and labeled “long-span” estimates by Marianne Ward and John Devereux, is to use time-series projection from a recent benchmark.Maddison, Monitoring; and Ward and Devereux, “Measuring British Decline.” The alternative procedure, labeled “direct estimates” by Ward and Devereux, is to use direct benchmark estimates for earlier years. Ward and Devereux provide some new “direct estimates” which they claim over-turn the conventional chronology of U.K./U.S. relative per capita income levels for the period 1870–1990, derived using “long-span” projections. One important purpose of this note is to dispute the new estimates, and hence to reassert the conventional chronology. Along the way, however, I wish also to make a more general methodological point about the use of time series projections and direct benchmark estimates of relative per capita income levels. In my view, it is unsatisfactory for researchers to note a large discrepancy and simply claim the superiority of one type of evidence over the other. Rather, a satisfactory account of the evolution of relative per capita incomes over a long period should be able to encompass both sorts of evidence.I am grateful to Nick Crafts, Douglas Puffert, Mark Harrison, Douglas Irwin, Angus Maddison, and Mary O'Mahony for comments on an earlier version and to Knick Harley for editorial advice. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.

We estimate the effect of age at arrival for immigrant outcomes with a new dataset of arrivals linked to the 1940 U.S. Census. Using within-family variation, we find that arriving at an older age, or having more childhood exposure to the European environment, led to a more negative wage gap relative to the native born. Infant arrivals had a positive wage gap relative to natives, in contrast to a negative gap for teenage arrivals. Therefore, a key determinant of immigrant outcomes during the Age of Mass Migration was the country of residence during critical periods of childhood development.

In the literature on India's economic history, there has been a long debate on the influence of railroad development on the welfare of Indian farmers. Some economists and historians have argued that rail development increased welfare by providing new markets for agricultural products and permitting rising rural incomes. Others have argued that railroads had detrimental effects on welfare because, by encouraging cultivation of non-food crops (like cotton) and export crops (like wheat), they reduced the domestic food supply. Those who have stressed the adverse effects of railroads have seen these effects as a consequence of imperialist economic relations between Britain and India. In this view, the combination of British land revenue policy and rail construction transformed the rural economy. The need to pay the land revenue in cash forced fanners to grow some crop for sale; the railroads permitted non-local (or even non-Indian) demand to influence the prices at which different crops could be sold.

In his presidential address last year Robert Gallman quoted a letter written by Lucien Febvre to Marc Bloch. Febvre and Bloch were the first editors of the journal Annales, and Febvre's exhortation on this occasion to break down the barriers among the social sciences was only one among many. Gallman's “Notes on the New Social History” would have pleased both French scholars, especially the allusion to verve and “trumpet call.” Today we are concerned with the role of economics in the galaxy of disciplines the Annales claim to unify in their “grand alliance.”

The depression of the nineties, including the Panic of 1893, has been a subject of great interest for economic historians, as well as for analysts of the business cycle. Coming at the climax of the bitter struggle over the gold standard, this crisis has usually been explained in polemical or oversimplified terms. Despite its significance, there is no published work dealing exclusively with the depression other than W. J. Lauck's The Causes of the Panic of 1893, which treats only the early phases of the crisis. Most explanations of the depression continue to reflect strongly those advanced as plausible during die period itself, with a few qualifications added as the result of the availability of some quantitative data and furdier reflection. Recent construction of additional quantitative series makes possible a more systematic analysis of the economic factors which interacted to precipitate a depression of major proportions.

During the second half of the nineteenth century important technological changes in shipping and shipbuilding resulted in the practical disappearance of an important shipbuilding industry in North America and the concentration of most of the world's shipbuilding in Britain. This shift of shipbuilding activity was quite clearly the result of the adoption of metal in place of wood as the structural material in shipbuilding. The adoption of metal was a slow process and the old and new techniques coexisted for decades. By the mid-1850's, British shipbuilders had developed the building of iron ships to a routine process and further improved their techniques in the following decades, but wooden shipbuilding in North America remained an important industry until the mid-1880's.

The period 1880–1910 saw great improvement in the health of city dwellers. Life expectancy at birth for males in Boston rose from 37 in 1880 to 46 in 1910; in New York City it rose from 29 in 1880 to 45 in 1910. The improvement in the state of health came largely from a decline in the incidence of infectious disease. Recent studies have suggested that most of this decline is fairly attributable to improvements in the standard of living—especially as reflected in diets and housing—and, for cities, to new public health measures—especially the installation of sanitary sewers and the provision of central supplies of pure drinking water. Government installation of public health projects in the United States was a part of the “sanitation movement,” which began some time around 1880. During the thirty-year period 1880–1910 there was a rapid increase in the fraction of the urban population served by sanitary sewers and improved water systems. For example, in 1875 fewer than 30,000 urban citizens were supplied with filtered water. By 1910 the figure had risen to over 10,000,000. That the improved health resulting from these public health measures must have been regarded by its recipients as an increase in their well being is clear. What is not clear is whether the recipients of improved health would have been even better off if the resources used in constructing and maintaining public health projects had been put to alternative uses unrelated to health. In this article I shall estimate the social rates of return on the cumulated investments in public health projects as could have been perceived by their builders and show that it may have exceeded the market rate of return on capital by several times.

This article analyzes the stability of bimetallism for countries operating in integrated bullion markets that enact different legal ratios. I articulate a new theoretical framework to demonstrate that two countries can both be bimetallic only if they coordinate their legal ratios. The theoretical framework is applied to the mid-eighteenth century when London's legal ratio was 3.8 percent higher than that of Amsterdam. I find that Amsterdam was effectively on the bimetallic standard, whereas London was on a de facto gold standard.

This article studies slave and other long-distance trades in eighteenth-century France. The data cover 238 ventures from seven French harbors between 1710 and 1780. Using the undiscounted benefit-cost ratio as a proxy for the internal rate of return, the article shows that these investments were more liquid, shorter, and more profitable than private notarized credit, without higher risk. They were safer and had a shorter duration than government bonds, without being less liquid or less profitable. The conclusion, that investment in these trades was preferable to domestic alternatives, may be explained by barriers to entry.

The question at issue is whether estimates of GNP and unemployment before 1930 exaggerate cyclical volatility enough to produce a false impression of increasing economic stability over the twentieth century. Based on research to be reported in detail at a later date, the answer is no. The range of possible exaggerations is small relative to the observed change.

Economic history, as a subject of separate study, is now nearly a hundred years old. No other idea which has emerged from it has gained a tithe of the attention that scholars, teachers, and the general public have focused on the “industrial revolution.” Yet there is scarcely a conception in economic history more misleading than one which relates all the important problems of our modern civilization to economic changes that are represented as taking place in England between 1760 and 1832. There is scarcely a conception that rests on less secure foundations than one which finds the key to an understanding of the modern industrialized world in these seventy-two years of English economic history.

The first systematic estimates of mortality on immigrant ships are presented in the paper. From passenger lists of immigrant arrivals, a sample of 1077 ships that arrived at New York between 1836 and 1853 was obtained and analyzed. Immigrants died at a rate of about 10 per thousand boarded per month with a significantly higher rate for 1849. Mortality was found to vary by sex, port of origin, and season of arrival. No significant variation was found between mortality and the following variables: crowding, nationality of the immigrant, and year of arrival.

Industrial investment in colonial India was segregated by the export industries, such as tea and jute that relied on British firms and the import substituting cotton textile industry that was dominated by Indian firms. Empirical evidence in this article does not suggest that barriers to entry faced by Indian entrepreneurs created this separation. Informational asymmetry played an important role. British entrepreneurs knew the export markets and the Indian entrepreneurs were familiar with local markets. Conditional on the initial advantage in entry, social network effects determined subsequent entry of firms by ethnicity and created separate spheres of industrial investment.