When contracting, European merchants could at least partially observe characteristics such as the health, physical strength, and education of indentured servants. These characteristics, unobservable to us, were likely to influence servitude duration, which is observable to us. We employ a switching regression model to analyze 2,066 servitude contracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Servants were positively selected to American mainland colonies in terms of their unobservable human capital and negatively selected to the West Indies. Thus, the relative quality of migrants' human capital may have played a role in the subsequent relative economic performance of these regions.

An economic downturn coincided with the start of the epidemic but the recession was short and moderate, compared with that of 1920/21. Cross-sectional high-frequency data indicate that the epidemic affected the labor supply sharply but briefly with no ensuing spill-overs; most of the recession, brief as it was, was due to the end of the war. I analyze weekly city-level mortality data and economic indicators with time series methods and structural estimation of an economic-epidemiological model: interventions to hinder the contagion reduced mortality at little economic cost, probably because reduced infections mitigated the impact on the labor force.

In 1842 Lowell textile firms increased weaving productivity by assigning three looms per worker instead of two. This marked a turning point. Before, weavers at Lowell were temporary and mostly literate Yankee farm girls; afterwards, firms increasingly hired local residents, including illiterate and Irish workers. An important factor was on-the-job learning. Literate workers learned new technology faster, but local workers stayed longer. These changes were unprofitable before 1842, and the advantages of literacy declined over time. Firm policy and social institutions slowly changed to permit deeper human-capital investment and more productive implementation of technology.

Early twentieth-century social reformers claimed that public insurance was necessary because employers ignored the financial needs of their unemployed, injured, or ill workers. Reformers dismissed the idea that competition in the labor market would boost the wages of workers who faced greater chances of job-related financial distress. This article reports a test of the compensating-wage-difference hypothesis on wage samples of men, women, and children from 1884 to 1903. We found mixed support for the reformers' claims: unemployment risk tended to be fully compensated; accident risk was only partially compensated; and occupational illness went unremunerated.

Alone woodsman erecting a log cabin, wagon trains curling across the prairies, fur trappers high in the mountains, Indian war parties, gold strikes, frontier marshalls and gunmen—of such stuff the legends of the American West have been formed and in the popular imagination they are the Westward Movement. Of course, serious historians have long recognized that this is merely a fascinating but veneer-like overlay which disguises a massive movement of people from East to West.

Historical scholarship on the politics of nineteenth-century Chinese immigration emphasizes the interests of labor and management in the genesis of congressional legislation in 1882 that limited Chinese immigration into the United States. This article examines early state attempts at the exclusion of Chinese workers after the first major wave of Chinese immigration during the California Gold Rush. Opposition to exclusion occurred in California in the early 1850s because Chinese immigrants were important taxpayers when both the state and localities were experiencing major fiscal difficulties. State attempts to legislate exclusion were successful only after financial conditions improved in the late 1850s.

The impact of China's demand for silver on global trade in specie and monetary metals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains poorly understood. Conventional wisdom postulates that seventeenth-century China became so dependent on foreign silver to sustain domestic economic growth that a sharp fall in silver imports in the 1640s led to the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. This hypothesis rests on dubious theoretical and empirical grounds. The demand for silver in China was determined by long-term changes in indigenous demand for money rather than short-term fluctuations in the flow of silver imports.

U.S. Steel held two-thirds of the American market in 1901, but by the 1930s its share had dropped to one-third. Such a decline is consistent with the economic theory of oligopoly pricing and capacity expansion, but the available data offer limited opportunities for formal testing of hypotheses. A close examination of U.S. Steel's early history leads us to argue that Chairman Elbert Gary's desire for price stability, his fear of antitrust litigation, and shortcomings in the firm's organizational capability constrained it from the unbridled pursuit of discounted profits that the economic theory assumes.

How much of the rapid growth in output per man-hour in nineteenth-century cotton weaving arose from technical change and how much arose from price-driven substitution of capital for labor? Using an engineering production function, I find that factor price changes account for little of the growth in output per man-hour. However, much of the growth and most of the apparent labor-saving bias arose not from inventions, but from improved labor quality—better workers spent less time monitoring the looms. Labor quality played a critical role in the persistent association between economic growth and capital deepening in this important sector.

Meat transformed North Atlantic shipping, leading to dominance of liners and changed the economics of freight rates. Management coordination of meat shipment led to concentration in shipping. Only liner companies could provide specialized ships with the regularity needed and they dominated North Atlantic shipping. The cargo capacity of cattle ships, beyond that used for animals, lowered freight rates on grain below levels that would otherwise have prevailed. The berth rate on wheat from New York to Liverpool was most affected. Consequently, this readily available freight rate can be potentially misleading as an indicator of ocean shipping developments.

Traditional male-female wage discrimination measures rely on residuals from earnings functions that standardize for observable characteristics. But many productivity determinants are unobservable, and existing proxies for them are often difficult to interpret. Instead of using the earnings-function approach, we estimate production functions, using data from the 1839–45 and 1860–65 French industry censuses for textiles. While most of our findings cast doubt on the idea of discrimination against women in pay, they do not rule out some other forms of discrimination, such as occupational segregation.

Using longitudinal data linked to the 1850 and 1860 U.S. federal census manuscript schedules, this article examines the effect of migration to high-risk malaria counties on real estate wealth accumulation. Although the migrants recognized the risk of malaria, they still migrated to malarial regions. Those who migrated to areas with higher risk of malaria experienced smaller increases in real estate wealth than migrants to less malarial areas. The findings in this study provide historical evidence with which to estimate the potential modern-day economic benefit of malarial eradication.

The mortality of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic crossing has long preoccupied historians but the relationship between slave traders' purchasing strategies and slave mortality rates in transit has escaped close investigation. We address these issues by using records of 39 eighteenth-century voyages of the Dutch Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie. These allow shipboard mortality rates of enslaved Africans to be estimated. They also reveal previously un-noticed age- and gender-based variations in slave purchase and mortality patterns, which in turn shed light on the relative importance of African and shipboard conditions in determining slave survival rates in the middle passage.

Contrary to the view that the periphery of the world economy benefited from rapidly expanding trade, the Ottoman economy actually faced a distinctly unfavorable world conjuncture during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rates of growth of foreign trade dropped, external terms of trade deteriorated, declining wheat prices affected peasant producers, and the establishment of European control over Ottoman finances led to large debt payments abroad.Indirect data indicate that rates of change of agricultural and aggregate production were also lower during the “Great Depression” as compared to the later period.

To be an expert was to assume a position of special significance in public life during and following the Progressive Era in America. To be trained in scientific principles of medicine, sociology, public administration, or economics was to be prepared to develop the opportunities and promises of American life and to reform those institutions and ideas that hindered progress. Some attention has been drawn to the limited use by government of professional academic economists starting in the early years of the twentieth century. But the work of American economists as advisers has generally been neglected, especially in relation to the study of American foreign relations. Focussing upon the work of Edwin W. Kemmerer in the five Andean countries of South America between 1923 and 1931, this article is an attempt to indicate the possibilities for fruitful research into various dimensions of foreign economic advising.

During the early years of the nineteenth century the mercantile community of Boston suffered the inconvenience of a double currency system. Boston banks accepted for deposit only “Boston money,” bank notes issued by Boston banks and readily redeemable in specie on demand at the counter of the issuing bank. But the common currency for all ordinary transactions was “foreign money” or “current money,” bank notes issued by out-of-town banks usually called country banks. Originally the Boston banks had accepted the notes of country banks at par or at a small discount and had returned them to the issuing banks for redemption rather than placing them back into circulation in Boston in competition with Boston bank notes. This policy had to be abandoned because of the inability of some country banks to redeem their excessive issues and the subterfuges adopted by other banks to avoid or delay redemption on the ground that the request for redemption was an imposition which restricted their legal circulation of bank notes. Moreover, there was always the risk that a country bank might fail before its notes could be presented for redemption by the Boston banks.

In spite of its importance to economic development, much remains unknown about commercial banking in early America. The Historical Statistics of the United States gives the number of banks, their capital stock, bank note circulation, deposits, and specie for only four years prior to 1830, and these data are far from complete. Economic and financial historians generalize about this period from statistics presented in Albert Gallatin's Considerations on the Currency of the United States and from the reports of the Treasury Department, summarized in the Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency, 1876.

The rise in productivity described by Dr. Jones, coupled with a static population, brought to an end the upward movement in the relative prices of farm products which had characterized the one hundred forty years preceding the Restoration. With the passing of the lean years, there followed almost a century of comparative plenty, bringing an increasing flow of food and raw materials.

Using district population in Spain between 1860 and 1991, recorded approximately every decade, this article examines whether initial population affects subsequent population growth. While such a relationship between these two variables hardly existed during the second half of the nineteenth century, this link increased significantly between 1910 and 1970, although this trend was abruptly interrupted by the Civil War and the autarkic period that followed. The intensity of this relationship decreased in the 1970s, a process that continued during the 1980s. Our findings also stress that agglomeration economies were stronger in medium-size districts, especially from 1960 onwards.