With use of innovative proxies and new annual data, I demonstrate that relatively high legal capacity and regulatory activity of the early-modern Polish parliament, the Seym, was positively associated with deeper domestic commodity market integration. Conversely, the lack of effective law-making, caused by the right of a single delegate to discontinue the Seym’s sessions, fostered market fragmentation. This indicates that early parliamentary regimes required legal capacity to harmonize domestic institutions and reduce the transaction costs. The Polish case suggests a hypothesis that the pre-1800 “Little Divergence” between European parliamentary regimes could be explained by differences in their governments’ capacities.

Black families included in the 1918/19 BLS Consumer Purchases Survey used installment credit more frequently and merchant credit less frequently than White families. Economic and demographic characteristics explain the racial difference for installment but not for merchant credit. I argue greater demand for installment credit by Black families was satisfied because repossession of collateral upon buyer default overcame merchants' personal prejudice with regard to creditworthiness, but absence of tangible collateral impacted the availability of merchant credit. Low use of merchant credit can account for relatively high interwar saving rates for low-income Black families.

As a nation becomes economically developed, the pace of development usually tends to vary between sectors and between regions of the nation. Industrialization usually involves more rapid growth and technological change in some industries than others. Often regional specialization accompanies industrialization, and, in fact, can become an important determinant in the industrialization process. With differential growth among industries, and increasing regional specialization, the performance of the factor markets in mobilizing and reallocating capital and labor among industries and regions becomes extremely important.

This article reappraises export performance on international markets before World War I by examinnig the case of cotton textiles. The German industry expanded its market share from the 1850s to 1914 despite remaining a high-cost industry relative to Great Britain. Evidence from contemporary accounts and analysis of trade data from 1913 suggests that German success arose in part from the importance of monopolistic competition in export markets for finished cloth. Germany’s relative wealth, geographic position, and perhaps the intensive marketing efforts of its industry may have enabled it to counter the cost advantage of its British rival.

Their heads are still gay with crimson kerchiefs, but those kerchiefs do not come from Manchester.

—E. E. Williams

Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this article we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. Although the central government can pool regional risks from variable taxes, local governments can measure variable tax bases more accurately. Evidence on tax assignment from the mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire supports the transaction cost explanation, suggesting that risk matters less because insurance can be obtained in a variety of ways.

Enacted in 1922 and repealed in 1929, the Sheppard-Towner program gave federal matching money to states to provide public health education to mothers. We examine variation in state participation in the program, and find that the timing of women's suffrage had an important impact. However, we find that the effect of suffrage was short-lived and did not influence public health spending after the program's repeal. We also find no evidence of a “demonstration effect.” On average, the states that continued activities after Sheppard-Towner ended were those that had sizable public health budgets before the program had even begun.

This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the wealthiest 10 and 25 percent of estates. We use regression analysis to identify the time trend of wealth inequality and determine how warfare, significant weather events, macroeconomic variables, and shifts in population characteristics affected it.

Housing was a major item of English consumer expenditure. Yet little is known of its average quality or rental cost. I estimate average rents, constant-quality rents, and housing quality from 1550 to 1909. Constant-quality rents rose substantially relative to other costs of living during the Industrial Revolution. This probably explains why, despite rising real wages, housing quality appears to have declined from 1760 to 1860. There were, however, substantial quality gains in the eighteenth century prior to the Industrial Revolution. The implications of these new series for measurement of growth during the Industrial Revolution are briefly explored.

This article describes the institutional transition from a centrally managed interregional payments system to an unmanaged, decentralized one after President Andrew Jackson's veto of the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States, and evaluates the effect on the level and variability of exchange rates. Comparison of the reduction in specie points, driven by falling transportation and insurance costs, with the reduction in exchange rates in two Ohio cities over the period from 1830 to 1859 lends support to the article's conclusion that decentralization was one cause of higher and more volatile inland exchange rates.

A decade has passed since I surveyed the first 50 years of the Journal of Economic History.Whaples, “Quantitative History.” This note picks up that story by documenting changes in the “supply” of economic history since 1990—the topics of the JOURNAL'S articles, who has had articles published in its pages, and how rankings of economic-history programs are reflected by recent publications. In addition, I use data on articles published in the JOURNAL to examine the “demand” for economic history—which articles have been cited the most often and what types of articles are most likely to be cited.

Railways were integral to the development of the Indian economy before World War I. This article presents new estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) for railways from 1874 to 1912, which highlight the strong performance of this key industrial sector. Railway-industry TFP growth was substantial averaging 2.3 percent per year and generating a 2.7 percent social savings for the Indian economy. A combination of factors contributed to TFP growth including greater capacity utilization, technological change, and improvements in organization and governance. Railways had higher TFP growth than most sectors in India and compared favorably with TFP growth in other countries.

Racial or ethnic wage differentials are common in labor markets composed of easily identifiable groups. This article analyzes a rare source of historical wage data for nonwhite populations. An American labor-market survey of Manila in 1900 revealed that average Chinese wages were about a third higher than Filipino wages. This differential appears to have been in large part an overtime premium that compensated Chinese for their longer workdays; partly it reflected Chinese segregation into higher-paying industries. It is, by contrast, very hard to identify any “pure” ethnic wage premium.

The process of technical change from the economist's viewpoint may be broken down into three phases: invention, innovation, and diffusion. Invention, or the increase in technological possibilities, is the discovery or perception of new configurations of technical processes or principles that alter the array of possible production functions. An innovation consists of using any given production function for the “first” time. Diffusion is basically imitative and involves the gradual replacement of old methods by the new. One example will suffice to illustrate these distinctions. The invention of the automatic bottle machine consisted of the conception, experimentation, and model-building activities of Michael J. Owens; the pioneering efforts of the entrepreneurs at Toledo, Ohio, to demonstrate that the new production function was both practical and economically feasible constituted the innovational phase; and the gradual replacement of hand-blown and semiautomatic machine methods by the new process in both American and foreign markets involved diffusion.

The ranching economies of California, southern Brazil, and Argentina resorted to different mechanisms of labor control in order to meet the growing demand for their products. Each area used different combinations of slave and wage labor as well as sharecropping arrangements, and these varied over time. I argue that this diversity cannot be explained by differences in the regions' modes of production or relative factor endowments. An alternative interpretive framework that incorporates social conflicts, civil strife, and the interaction between ranchers and the state is needed to explain the differences in modes of labor control.

The Dictionary of American Biography contains 1,464 biographies of eminent American businessmen. Among them are most of the wellknown financial and business figures, as well as many others never widely known or else long forgotten. The announced criterion for inclusion in the D.A.B. is that the person “did something notable in some field of American life.” Over 100 “consulting specialists” handled the various lists of candidates for inclusion; these specialists included economic and business historians.

The long and glorious commercial history of Amalfi, which began some time about the middle of the eighth century, came to an abrupt end on November 24, 1343. On that day a raging storm accompanied by a tidal wave destroyed the lower town and swallowed all the harbor installations, including the famed sea fortifications. From that blow Amalfi never recovered. The present lovely resort appears as a most unlikely setting for a republic which was once a great maritime town in the western Mediterranean.

The enclosure of the open fields is an example of Europeans' willingness to alter long-standing social and economic institutions in the interest of higher living standards. In Scandinavia, England, and Germany the rise in the value of enclosed relative to unenclosed land induced widespread abandonment of open-field forms of agrarian organization by the middle of the nineteenth century. In France, on the other hand, the traditional patterns of landholding maintained themselves until after the First World War. This paper examines some of the ways French farmers responded to the possibilities of agricultural change within the traditional framework of open-field agriculture.

Studies have shown a connection between finance and growth, but most do not consider how financial and real factors interact to put a virtuous cycle of economic development into motion. As the main transportation advance of the nineteenth century, railroads connected established commercial centers and made unsettled areas along their routes better candidates for development. We measure the strength of links between railroads and banks in seven Midwest states using an annual transportation geographic information system (GIS) database linked to a census of banking. These data indicate that those counties that already had a bank were more likely to see their first railroad go through over the next decade, while new banks tended to enter a county a year or two after a railroad was built. The initial banking system thus helped establish the rail system, while the rapid expansion of railroads helped fill in the banking map of the American Midwest.

Between 1880 and 1939 Burma, Malaya, and Thailand received inflows of migrants from India and China comparable in size to European immigration in the New World. This article examines the forces that lay behind migration to Southeast Asia and asks if experience there bears out Lewis's unlimited labor supply hypothesis. We find that it does and, furthermore, that immigration created a highly integrated labor market stretching from South India to Southeastern China. Emigration from India and China and elastic labor supply are identified as important components of Asian globalization before the Second World War.