This paper uses a taxation assessment to analyze the relations between taxable peasant wealth and regional marketing geography. The results show cashcropping patterns for different grains and livestock. The selectivity of market involvement poses broader questions concerning economic vulnerability at the household and community levels among the English peasantry, and strategies used to contain vulnerability.

We show that the sale of state-owned firms in dictatorships can help political corporations to emerge and persist over time. Using new data, we characterize Pinochet’s privatizations in Chile and find that some firms were sold underpriced to politically connected buyers. These newly private firms benefited financially from the Pinochet regime. Once democracy arrived, they formed connections with the new government, financed political campaigns, and were more likely to appear in the Panama Papers. These findings reveal how dictatorships can influence young democracies using privatization reforms.

The United States economy completed its recovery from the Great Depression in 1942, restoring full-employment output in that year after 12 years of below-full-employment performance. Fiscal policies were not the most important factor in the 1933 through 1940 phase of the recovery, but they became the most important factor after 1940, when the recovery was less than half-complete. World War II fiscal policies were, then, instrumental in the overall restoration of full-employment performance.

Most historical studies of immigration in nineteenth-century America have failed to distinguish among the labor-market experiences of different immigrant groups. Using a sample of some 4000 wage earners from turn-of-the-century Iowa, we examine the relative earnings of skilled and unskilled immigrants and suggest the factors which contributed to their very different post-immigration experiences. The results indicate that prior knowledge of a trade conferred upon immigrants an initial earnings advantage, but that unskilled immigrants managed subsequently to close some but not all of the gap by reaping greater returns to experience on the job.

The merger movement between the First World War and the Great Depression played an important role in the evolution of the American banking industry. The first complete statistical series on mergers is presented and the factors that contributed to the merger are analyzed.

Do human capital endowments trump location for knowledge-intensive industries? This article takes advantage of a natural experiment created by the end of the Soviet planned economy in 1991, which had geographically distributed R&D manpower according to planned needs as opposed to a distribution determined by a market economy. It examines the extent to which the planned economy created a path-dependence in the location of post-Soviet human-capital intensive production. The study finds that regions with more R&D personnel in 1991 did better in the development of modern market-oriented knowledge-intensive business services, like engineering and IT. Several explanations are offered for this path-dependence, with an emphasis on human capital externalities being the most plausible.

This article assumes that the only effect of slavery was the relief of a labor constraint facing individual farmers, and shows the conditions under which slavery would increase the share of agriculture in total output, reduce the size of the market for, and the incentive to invent and innovate, new farm machinery. Two farm models are developed, one with a fixed laborconstraint, the other with a rising labor supply-curve; these are contrasted with a third model of an unconstrained farm. The constrained (free labor) and unconstrained (slave labor) models successfully predict several salient differences between northern and southern agriculture and industry.

In this article I provide a micro-level analysis of primary schooling in Victorian England. Using a new dataset of school-age males linked between the 1851 and 1881 population censuses, I examine the determinants of childhood school attendance and the impact of attendance on adult labor market outcomes. I find that schooling had a positive effect on adult occupational class and that the associated wage gains were likely to have outweighed the cost of schooling. However, this effect was small relative to father's class, and the effect of education on earnings appears to have been small relative to modern results.

This paper measures the growth and relative levels of total factor productivity in the American, British, French, Belgian, and German mineral fuel pig iron industries from 1840 to 1909. The American history was peculiar in that there was little productivity growth betwen 1840 and 1870 and then rapid growth until 1890. Regression models are developed to identify the techniques responsible for the American advance. Much of the American experience is explained by changes in the composition of the available iron ores. An assessment of the international transferability of late-nineteenth-century blast furnace technology is offered.

The performance of the Italian economy just before World War I was relatively poor as a result of a backward productive structure. Among other reasons, this may have been caused by the lack of domestic coal reserves, especially given the features of nineteenth-century technology. However, many economic historians resist this argument since coal could be either imported or substituted. Although both solutions were attempted in Italy, this article demonstrates that neither solved the Italian energy problem. In particular, the contribution made by electricity was much less effective than many contemporaries and historians have suggested.

The circumstances resulting in the Coinage Act of February 21, 1853 support Harry Johnson's thesis that historically fiduciary money has been substituted “for commodity-money in response to the interaction of scarcity of the latter and ingenuity in devising the former.” The Act of 1853 replaced bimetallism in the U.S. with a Composite Legal Tender System composed of a subsidiary small silver coinage adjunct to a de facto gold standard. After 1853 bimetallism remained only as a legal fiction which was finally terminated twenty years later.

Public mass modern education was a major pillar of state-led development in the post-Colonial period. I examine the impact of Egypt's transformation in 1951–1953 of traditional elementary schools (kuttabs) into modern primary schools on the Christian-Muslim educational and occupational differentials, which were in favor of Christians. The reform granted kuttabs' graduates (where Muslim students were over-represented) access to higher stages of education that were previously confined to primary schools' graduates. Exploiting the variation in exposure to the reform across cohorts and districts of birth among males in 1986, I find that the reform benefited Muslims but not Christians.

After the Civil War, Congress maintained high import tariffs to pay off the public debt. By the early 1880s the federal government was running large fiscal surpluses –revenues exceeded expenditures by over 40 percent. The Democrats proposed lower tariffs to reduce customs revenue. The Republicans proposed higher tariffs to reduce imports and customs revenues. This article attempts to determine the revenue effects of the proposed changes. Given the height of the tariff and the price elasticity of U.S. import demand, the actual tariff was below the maximum revenue rate, and therefore a tariff reduction would have reduced customs revenue.

… for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. In other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. At every change in economic organization we find a breach of continuity. It is as if the capitalists who have up to that time been active, recognize that they are incapable of adapting …. They withdraw from the struggle and become an aristocracy, which if it again plays a part in the course of affairs does so in a passive manner only, assuming the role of silent partners. In their place arise new men.…

Using the 1888 Cost of Living Survey, I estimate the demand for calories of American and British industrial workers. I find that the income and expenditure elasticities of calories for American households are significantly lower than the corresponding elasticities for British households, suggesting that American industrial workers were nutritionally better off than their British counterparts. I further find that the calorie elasticity differential between the two countries was driven by the higher wages enjoyed in the United States. Additional analysis reveals that the relative price of calories was approximately 20 percent greater in Great Britain than in the United States.

The redemption system transformed the American auction of immigrant servants. The potential for exploiting immigrants was created by search restrictions in the redemption auction. A model of the auction was estimated using 4,455 German and British servant contracts. Average servant compensation equaled resident free labor compensation, and the variance in servant compensation was systematically related to the variance in servant productivity, contract restrictions, and work amenities. Competition among buyers overcame the search restrictions placed on immigrants in the redemption auction.

This study of Indian behavior in the fur trade is offered more as a report of a study in progress than a completed piece of historical research. In fact, the research has barely begun. But in spite of its unfinished state, the tentative results of the work I have done to this point may be of some interest as an illustration of the way in which the recent revival of analytical interest in institutions may be used to develop an approach to the economic history of the fur trade.

Since the time of Ashley at least, it has not been possible to charge the Catholic church of the Middle Ages with having intended to throttle business enterprise by its doctrine of usury. Very few medieval writers, certainly after the early thirteenth century, wished to outlaw profit when it was a legitimate return on investment. To authoritative theologians and jurists there was a world of difference between usury, that is profit openly demanded or secretly hoped for in a contract of loan (mutuutn), and justifiable returns derived from partnerships, where there was a sharing of the risk and venture of the capital. The doctors operated with distinctions of Roman law by which the mutuum, explicitly referred to in the Vulgate at Luke 6:35, was clearly marked off from other transactions, such as the consensual contracts of partnership (societas), letting and hiring (locatio conductio), and purchase and sale (emptio venditio).

Recent accounts of medieval agricultural organization begin not with a description of “the” manor but with a warning that no single archetype may be considered appropriate. From place to place, from generation to generation, a property might be exploited as a single unit, divided between tenancies and demesne, or wholly partitioned into tenancies; and the land would be worked by a correspondingly varied mixture of “employees” and independent labor. This complex historical record is still far from being explained by a suitable model. In the secondary sources, the varying size of the demesne is most frequently attributed to changes in relative prices: the demesne is buoyant, it is argued, when output prices are high and wages low; when prices fall and wages rise, rents become more attractive and the demesne is parcelled out. The difficulty with this explanation, however, is that rents are not independent of output prices and wages: in simple economic theory, rent so adjusts to prices and wages as to always equal the surplus that could be earned by direct exploitation, and the proportion of tenant land on an estate is a matter of indifference. This does not of course mean that it was so in fact; it does mean, however, that one must carefully specify which of the many considerations neglected by that simple theory are in fact critical to the problem at hand.