Under the Civil War pension act of 1862, Union Army widows were entitled to pensions; however, they lost these pensions if they remarried. Using a database compiled from widows' pension files, I estimate the effect this had on widows' remarriage decisions. I find that receiving a pension lowered the hazard rate of remarriage by 25 percent, which implies an increase in the median time to remarriage of 3.5 years. Among older women, the effect is greater. These results suggest that many Union Army widows faced highly unfavorable marriage prospects.

Premodern human capital accumulation helps to explain the exceptional growth performance of the Japanese economy in the last hundred years. Prior to this century informal institutions were more important for human capital formation than were the more formal ones familiar today. This paper examines a few seminal changes—national market formation, population control, and the involvement of farmers in rural administration—that were primarily responsible for the emergence of economically responsive, more productive individuals in rural Japan.

In terms of revenues and expenditures, local government was the largest component of the U.S. federal system in 1902. Although it has been conjectured that this was also true during most of the nineteenth century, the evidence to support the conjecture is weak. We present a summary of a large sample of data for individual cities in 1850, 1860, and 1870, and link it to census data for 1880, 1890, and 1902.We study effects of city size and geographical location, and trends over time in city fiscal activity. Our provisional conclusion is that local government became the largest of the three components in the federal system only toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Every generation has interpreted the monetary experience of the colonies in the light of its own problems. The Jacksonian period produced the interpretations of Gouge just as the silver controversy of the 1890's produced the work of Bullock and Davis. The reaction to the financial fundamentalism of the 1890's came largely from the work of R. A. Lester and the unpublished but celebrated work of L. Brock in the late thirties and early forties, heavily influenced by the experience of the depression. From the latter two, a new orthodoxy has emerged among American historians, under the authority of E. James Ferguson, whose important recent study, The Power of the Purse, defends the paper money currencies of the colonies by a well-reasoned appeal to the modern fiscal practice of financing war by inflation.

In 1855 the volume of immigration to the United States dropped precipitously, signaling the end of the first mass migration of Europeans. Although other work blames the decline on an economic depression, the outbreak of the Crimean War, or the improvement of conditions in Europe, this article argues that the rise of nativism was the initiating cause of the decline. This result is important because it affects our view of the factors that have cyclical effects on the volume of immigration.

The theory of proto-industrialization holds that a major expansion of rural industry, primarily in textiles, formed a phase precursory to industrialization in many European regions. This phase was characterized by sweeping economic and demographic changes, including increasing population density, land subdivision, and agricultural intensification. Domestic industry boosted marriage rates and may have lowered the average age of marriage of rural dwellers. The present research examines the tenets of this theory for the case of Ireland, a country affected by rural industrialization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The data are cross-sectional and are drawn primarily from the 1841 census.

The Postan thesis is that medieval agriculture had low yields because there was insufficient pasture to keep the arable land fertile. This argument (and variants of it) has become an orthodox technological explanation for low preindustrial yields. Yet the thesis, on its face, implies that early cultivators were ignorant, irrational, or completely custom bound. This article develops a revised Postan thesis, in which medieval cultivators knew that pasture restored fertility but were unwilling to employ it. Impatience made this way of increasing yields unattractive because it required large capital investments in the soil nitrogen stock.

Standard productivity measures indicate large fluctuations in technology during the Great Depression. This article's historical technology series (1892–1966), controlled for aggregation effects, varying input utilization, non-constant returns, and imperfect competition, does not indicate technology regress such that could trigger the downturn. In contrast, technology improvements in the recovery were so rapid that, over the whole Great Depression period, technology growth was highest among pre-WWII decades. This article also finds that output changed little and inputs fell when technology improved in the pre-WWII period. Real-business-cycle models have difficulty in explaining pre-WWII business cycles characterized by such responses.

In prosperous and depressed areas sectors of industry representing structural transformation in interwar Britain tended to draw upon new types of workers rather than upon workers displaced in declining export industries. Data on the age and sex composition of people in expanding and declining industries, on new entrants to the labor force, and on interindustry mobility are examined to support this claim. The process reflects a general tendency of capitalist economies to grow through incorporation of new elements.

We analyze the effects of ownership of liberty bonds on election outcomes in the 1920s. We find that counties with higher liberty bond ownership rates turned against the Democratic Party in the presidential elections of 1920 and 1924. This was a reaction to the depreciation of the bonds prior to the 1920 election (when the Democrats held the presidency) and the appreciation of the bonds in the early 1920s (under a Republican president), as the Federal Reserve raised and then subsequently lowered interest rates. Our analysis suggests that the liberty bond campaigns had unintended political consequences.

The U.S. home ownership rate rose by 10 percentage points between 1940 and 1945, despite severe restrictions on construction during World War II. I investigate whether wartime rent control played a role in this shift. The empirical test exploits variation in rent reductions across cities that had similar increases in rents prior to control. This variation does not appear to be correlated with underlying trends also driving home ownership. Greater initial rent reductions led to larger increases in home ownership; rent control can account for a significant share of the increase in home ownership over the early 1940s.

Analysis of 80 skeletons from Cedar Grove, Arkansas, permits comparison of the skeletal data with historic accounts and interpretations of textual data. The high frequencies of skeletal lesions indicating dietary deficiencies and infectious disease demonstrates that this was a highly stressed population and that Cedar Grove participated in the historically documented nationwide decline of Afro-American health. The evidence is overwhelming that congenital syphilis was a major contributor to high infant mortality and population decline.

The broblem with recent historical debates over the segmentation and intergration of labor markets iis that they typically fail to sort out disequlibrium demand shocks from equlibrating migrant-supply responses. This article does so, by exploring the determinants of wage gaps between farm and city for eight countries over the century following 1860.

One seemingly certain characteristic of the social structure of Europe between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries was the persistence in power, wealth, and eminence of limited numbers of individuals or families. These made up the aristocracies, the nobilities of feudal origin, the ennobled officeholders of the new monarchies, and the patrician oligarchs of the towns. Political structures provided these families with privileged status and favored their preservation of wealth and influence, while a relatively slow rhythm of economic change and growth in general population tended to secure them against displacement by newcomers. In Italy, distant from the new centers of Atlantic trade, where tensions between absolutism and traditional liberties were fought out mainly within the ruling groups themselves, this stratification of society seemed almost a “new feudalism” in the seventeenth century as the powerful families of the petty courts consolidated their power.

Alexander Gerschenkron's research on industrialization in Europe suggests that both the timing and character of growth may have conditioned the institutional structure of nineteenth-century industrializers. He argues that:

…the more backward a country's economy, the greater was the part played by specialized institutional factors designed to increase the supply of capital to nascent industries and, in addition, to provide them with less decentralized and better informed entrepreneurial guidance; the more backward the country, the more pronounced was the coerciveness and comprehensiveness of those factors.

Focusing on the New York banking sector, we analyze a neglected, but profound impact of the National Banking Acts. By resisting federal banking legislation and “boycotting” newly chartered national banks, the New York Clearing House Association members created market opportunities for the new entrants to dominate the correspondent banking market. The new entrants’ aggressive tactics including interest payments on deposits increased their vulnerability to panicky withdrawals by country banks. They also magnified conflicts of interest within the clearinghouse, which weakened its central banking functions and further destabilized the macroeconomy.

Liberal Italy, 1860–1922, has never stimulated the same interest as the Risorgimento era, which spawned the unitary state, or the Fascist experiment, which destroyed it. Admittedly a number of works have dealt with the liberal period, but these have been all too few and very general in scope. Little, for example, has been written in English about Italian economic growth during these years and even less is known about the commercial policy of the unitary Kingdom. Contemporary critics of the tariff clamored that duties were exorbitant, were politically motivated, favored the North at the expense of the South, and increased industrial profits while they burdened agriculture. But there has not been a full scholarly analysis of commercial policy which would permit an appraisal of these criticisms.

This article provides estimates of Belgian food consumption in 1812 and 1846 using a national food balance sheet approach. These estimates are then converted into caloric intakes for adult male equivalents. Despite many accounts of an absolute pauperization of the Belgian population during this period, caloric consumption per equivalent adult male is shown to have merely stagnated between 1812 and 1846. There is indirect evidence that inequality in caloric consumption increased at the same time. Energy cost-accounting exercises reveal that the residual caloric quantity available for physical exertion was minimal for large sections of the population.

In seventeenth-century England the relatively open trades to America attracted ventures by hundreds of small merchants and shopkeepers. This ease of entry was checked after 1685 by very high customs duties on tobacco and intense regulation. Between 1685 and 1775 the number of firms in that trade was radically reduced and the size of the average firm increased ten to thirtyfold. Comparable if less extreme trends can be detected in the sugar, slave, and Levant trades. Insurance enabled large firms to use shipping more efficiently. The increased availability of credit also benefited larger and more secure firms.