If replacing welfare with private charity has increased the self-reliance of the poor, the benefits would be observed in the charity organization movement of the late nineteenth century. Inebriation would subside, the heart would be cheered, earnings would rise, the “broken” would be “complete,” dependence would wither, and the classes would converge. If the benefits were large, they would have been large in Indianapolis—the beacon of charity in a Coasean landscape. The hypotheses are tested in hazard models using a sample from 25 years of household-level caseworker manuscripts. The evidence is not suggestive in the direction of hope.

Previous studies of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have relied on votes recorded for the state blocs or a relatively small number of delegate votes. We construct a new data set covering delegate votes on over 600 substantive roll calls, and use the data in several ways. First, we estimate a single dimensional position for the delegates which reflects their overall voting patterns. Next, we explain these positions using a variety of delegate and constituent variables. Finally, we suggest a method for identifying state and floor medians, which can be used to predict equilibrium outcomes at the Convention.

The role of white servitude evolved in a similar way during the American colonial period in those West Indian and southern mainland colonies where slavery became quantitatively important. The change from primary reliance on bound white labor to the use of slaves occurred in two steps, with an initial transition from servants to slaves in unskilled field work, followed some time later by widespread training of blacks and substitution of slaves for servants in skilled occupations. The timing of the two steps can be explained as a function of the changing relative costs of indentured and slave labor in the markets for unskilled and skilled labor.

The 1940s marked a turning point in the labor market outcomes of African-American women. They experienced large wage gains relative to white women, sharp declines in agricultural and domestic service work, and significant increases in formal sector employment. Using a semiparametric decomposition technique, we assess the influence of changes in productive and personal characteristics, in workers' distribution across occupations and locations, and in the wage structure on both black women's absolute wage gains and those relative to white women's. We argue that the pattern of changes is most consistent with increasing demand for their labor in the formal sector.

I use a rich new dataset of Louisiana slave records to answer long-standing questions about manumission. I examine who was manumitted, by whom, and whether manumittees paid prices above market for their freedom, shedding some light on the debate of the efficiency of slavery. Legal changes after the Louisiana Purchase allow us to conclude that manumission laws were quite important in determining the terms at which manumission agreements were struck: when slaves lost the right to sue for self-purchase at market price, there was a precipitous drop in the number of manumissions, while prices paid increased.

An international sample of 349 British-owned firms is analyzed to test the effectiveness of the International Tea Agreements of 1930 and 1933. Although the agreements reduced output overall, in 1930 there were significant regional differences in the extent of compliance, with firms in Eastern India reducing output more than did firms in Ceylon. These differences can be attributed to regional differences in organizational structure. Archival evidence suggests that the breakdown of collusion in 1931 and 1932 was due to a bargaining conflict between established producers in India and Ceylon and the newer plantations of Java and Sumatra.

Producers of commodities like wheat and sugar may envy the facility with which the tea growing industry obtained a 30 percent rise in average tea prices and a 90 percent enhancement of tea share values—all within the space of a little more than six months.

The Economist, 26 August 1933

Using an event study approach, we find the announcement by the Bank of France in 1907 to accelerate gold payments directly for U.S. crops is associated with the ultimate upturn in U.S. equity prices. Spillover to the French financial markets accompanied the Regents’ decision to release sterilized reserves, thereby arresting the drainage of coin in French circulation. Counterfactual analysis shows that the facility alone would have been unlikely to end the crisis. Investors may have revised equity expectations upward, recognizing that the acceleration in reliable seasonal gold flows would relieve monetary stringency.

The article develops a model of gold-standard efficiency in the context of the theory of efficient asset markets. Efficiency is measured by the ratio of experienced disutility to the hypothetical loss under perfect gold arbitrage and neutral exchange-rate speculation. Dollar-sterling gold-point estimates for 1890 to 1906 are generated using the methodology of focusing on the dominant arbitrageurs, the prevailing exchange instrument, and the primary form of gold shipped. Gold- standard efficiency is remarkably high and only marginally below exchange- market efficiency from 1950 to 1966 under Bretton Woods.

We examine the Austro-Hungarian bentwood furniture industry as a case study for modem industrialization during the second half of the nineteenth centuly. We establish that, through the implementation of innovative production methods and aggressive and insightful marketing strategies, this industry constitutes an important example of the modem industrial enterprise. Furthermore, we find evidence of cooperative behavior in the industry, making it an interesting case study in the history of industrial organization.

The role money has played, and still plays, in the evolution of social organization and individual behavior remains a dark area though some corners besides price history have been studied intensively. You know better than I how much has been written by anthropologists, numismatists, and historians about such matters as the different forms of money men have used, the evolution of coinage, the relation of gifts and piracy to the rise of regular trade and organized markets, the commutation of dues in kind and services into money payments, the transformation of an agricultural peasantry into an industrial proletariat, the changing methods of governmental finance in war and peace, the development of credit and banking, the spread of bookkeeping and its refinement into accounting, the diverse forms of business enterprises, and the interrelations between making goods and making money. Some of the monographs I have read upon these and related topics are admirable pieces of work. But monographs are flashlights; they do not give general illumination. What we do not yet have, what we need, and what economic historians should supply is a coherent story of how monetary forms have infiltrated one human relation after another, and their effects upon men's practices and habits of thought. I am well aware that the spadework desirable for this job is far from completed; but even now wellequipped students could draw an authentic sketch of the process as a whole. By so doing they would both stimulate detailed research and enlighten the thinking of all who are concerned with social organization, past and present.

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers' reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from contemporary sources.

“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything. Eulogy is invariably dull—a fact that Mr. Alf had discovered and utilized.”

A. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875

“And did you threaten him with the newspapers?”

H. de Balzac, La maison Nucingen, 1837

The Ottoman Empire did not escape the “price revolution” of the “long” sixteenth century. As far as the Bursa silk industry was concerned, however, the rate of increase of relative prices was such as to result in a price “scissors.” This situation led to declining profits in the production of cloth, while profits in the production of the raw material were substantial. A transformation of Bursa's economy from cloth production to raw material production followed. It appears that this transformation conformed to a cyclical pattern in the following centuries, a pattern that was chiefly dictated by European economic might.

“Show us a non-resident who has made money speculating in western land,” wrote a frontier newspaper editor in 1850, “and we will show you a rare bird, more rare by far than a successful gold hunter.” Despite this warning and dozens like it, thousands of investors ventured surplus or borrowed funds on frontier land throughout the nineteenth century. Many, in fact, jumped from one frontier to the next on the heels of government surveyors and land officers. Either these businessmen were gluttons for punishment, or speculating in government land was far more rewarding than some contemporaries were willing to admit.

The image of the “backward” immigrant has enjoyed a prominent place in American history, in large part because of the perceived “non-American” fertility behavior of many immigrant groups. The European perspective on these migrants, however, has been to see them as innovators, breaking free from the demographic constraints of the Old World. Drawing upon a large sample of reconstituted Norwegian immigrant families, this article examines the rising and then declining fertility of this group over the second half of the nineteenth century. It concludes that their fertility experience was influenced both by cultural tenacity and economic opportunity.

The first price runs for Korean rice help us develop a Smithian physiocratic model to explain the low, stable prices of the eighteenth century and the rising, volatile prices of the nineteenth. Ownership rights provided incentives, and productivity after 1600 exceeded subsistence to achieve rural commercialization. Infrastructure investment from the late seventeenth century promoted development and prosperity, but declining investment, dysfunctional institutions, bad weather, and a population crash pushed the economy towards subsistence in the nineteenth. Decline saw rice monoculture, inflation, and price volatility even before imperialism's impact. Parallels with China suggest an “East Asian” premodern agricultural model.

Economic historians have stressed the importance of households and household formation but have devoted little attention to the process of leaving home. Leaving home in Ireland is important because of households' role in post-Famine demographic patterns. A matched Irish manuscript census sample for 1901 and 1911 shows that Irish males left home later than females. Statistical tests show that much of this reflects an Irish inheritance system that led many males never to leave home. Other economic forces, such as labor market opportunities, often had opposite impacts on males and females.

We use newly available micro-data from the 1911 to 1941 Canadian Censuses to investigate the impact of immigration on the Canadian earnings distribution in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that Canadian inequality rose sharply in the inter-war years, particularly in the 1920s, coinciding with two of the largest immigration decades in Canadian history. We find that immigration was not the main force driving changes in the earnings distribution. This results from a combination of self-selection by immigrants, occupational adjustments after arrival, and general equilibrium adjustments in the economy.

Mauriac, and probably several thousand other Frenchmen, have remarked that what worried them most about the United States and Russia was not the respects in which these countries differed but rather that they were fundamentally so much alike. If Mauriac had studied the history of the land-grant colleges and universities, he might have concluded that they were both the most Russian-like and the most thoroughly American sector of our education. Where else could one find schools so materialistically oriented or so (almost) successfully Jacksonian? To look at their history and their impact on American economic life over the past century is to examine a roaringly optimistic and an almost frighteningly successful endeavor to create the men—and the women—for a mass economy.

An issue of continuing interest in Canadian economic history is the lag between the formulation of policies directed toward settling the prairies and the appearance of any significant agricultural population. Proposals to develop the region preceded the union of the British North American colonies in 1867. By 1872 the first Homestead Act had been passed and a commitment made to construct a transcontinental railway linking the western provinces to Central Canada. Yet except for a brief speculative boom in the early 1880's, occasioned by the CPR reaching Winnipeg, the rate of settlement remained well below expectations. Homestead entries averaged under 3,000 from 1874 to 1896, and in many years there were nearly as many cancellations as new entries. In the same period adjacent American lands were filling up, in large part with emigrant Canadians. Settlement of the Dakotas, beginning in 1870 but depressed from 1873 to 1878, boomed from 1879 to 1886. Over the thirty years from 1870 to 1900 an estimated 120,000 Canadians chose the American prairies over the Canadian.