The connection between the spatial pattern of the urban growth spurt of the 1880s and the mortgage market is an aspect of the familiar capital market segmentation hypothesis that has received little attention. Although mortgage lending expanded most rapidly in the smaller western cities during the decade, I conclude that an underlying pattern of segmentation impeded urbanization in these areas at least until 1890. The initial advantage that segmentation conferred on borrowers in the East was reduced to some extent by binding usury ceilings along the Atlantic seaboard.

This paper uses numismatic sources to estimate the volume of unaccounted currency issued during the middle two quarters of the nineteenth century. “Unaccounted currency” includes any currency issued by private business firms and by municipal and state governments. This money, unlike state bank notes and deposits and federal government currencies, was issued illegally, and not recorded in conventional statistical sources. Exact quantification, therefore, is next to impossible. The principal significance of this phenomenon is the credibility it gives to private competitive issues of money.

This Article summarizes the main findings of a detailed. study of the changing occupational and industrial structure of Mexico's non-agricultural labor force from 1895 to 1930 and from 1930 to 1950, based on a comparison of population censuses, especially those of 1895, 1930, and 1950. Structural changes in Mexico's labor force have never been adequately studied, and the results of the present research shed considerable new light on Mexico's development. The findings also suggest important paradoxes and discontinuities in the early stages of industrialization that merit systematic recognition in models and measurements of structural change over the course of development.

For many Western countries the history of the last two centuries reveals both a sustained rise in per capita output and a tendency toward a more equal distribution of the economic product. The experience has been characterized, however, by repetitive fluctuations in the levels and growth rates of aggregate production and its components. The length of the shorter of these fluctuations, the business cycle, ranges from the 40- to 45-month inventory cycle to the so-called Juglar of seven to ten years. Two other classes of interruptions in the secular trend have also been singled out for study by economic historians. The first is the Kondratieff cycle, a movement of roughly fifty years which has been primarily identified in price series. The second is the Kuznets cycle, or “long swing,” which in length is between the Juglar and the Kondratieff. The long swing constitutes the primary theme of this study.

This study investigates the relationship between income and fertility in Nuits-Saint-Georges, a small Burgundian town. Nuits offers a rich location to study fertility because of its broad range of occupations, income, and literacy. I constructed a data set that linked fertility through 1792 for couples married between 1744 and 1779 with fiscal records tracking the families' tax payments. Controlling for occupation and literacy, my principle findings were that wealthier families had more births, changes in fertility were positively correlated with increases in income over the life cycle, and marital fertility in Nuits steadily declined over the latter eighteenth century.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner. This article is part of a thesis written under the supervision of Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. The author would like to thank Jean-LaurentRosenthal, Kathleen McGarry, Duncan Thomas, Pia Orrenius, Rosemary Hyson, George Deltas, Aileen Thompson, Shawn Ulrick, three anonymous referees, and two editors at this JOURNAL for many helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.

The purpose of my studies is to estimate the total and per capita wealth of the thirteen colonies in the early 1770's and something of its composition and distribution. The estimates for New England presented here add another building block to the accumulating evidence that a rather high level of living was reached in the American colonies at the close of over 150 years of economic development. They also show that wealth was unequally distributed among the population in this transitionally commercial era, well before the onset of industrialism. They yield quantitative evidence as well on size of wealth in relation to such characteristics of wealth holders as their age and sex, occupations, urban or rural residence and testacy, that is whether or not they left a will at death.

This article offers a new interpretation of the low level of investment in Germany during the interwar period. Earlier contributions attributed the slow expansion of capital stock either to excessive wages due to state intervention and unionization or to the high cost of capital. These hypotheses are tested by estimating a cointegration model of investment. Counterfactual simulations demonstrate that lower wages would have lowered investment still further and that high interest rates acted as the main brake on investment during the second half of the 1920s.

Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch, accomplished scientists and prominent executives in the BASF and IG Farben chemical corporations, were drawn together by mutual admiration and common technical interests. In the Nazi era, however, they came to embody competing liberal and nationalist conceptions of German political economy. This article examines their relationship, the reasons for their divergent stances, and their individual contributions to the economic and productive power of the Third Reich. Ironically, Bosch's understanding of his industry, his nation, and scientific progress led him to oppose the Nazis, but also to lay the basis for their recruitment of Krauch and the German chemical industry for their expansionist purposes.

The rise of serfdom in the sixteenth century undoubtedly has political explanations, but the form that it took has economic explanations. In particular, it took the form of forced labor on enlarged manorial farms. The economic explanation, buttressed with evidence from the period, is that an enserfed labor force must be watched more than free renters and the watching is best done in a manorial framework. The model is stated formally and its implications compared point-by- point with the voluminous evidence for Poland and neighboring regions.

This paper offers a revised series of nineteenth-century Anglo-American foreign exchange rates. The new series is based partly on the reinterpretation of data presented earlier by other scholars and partly on a recently rediscovered source of continuous information on sterling-dollar rates after 1869. The pioneering work in this area was done by Lance Davis and Jonathan Hughes. They published in 1960 a quarterly dollar-sterling exchange rate series (1835 to 1895) based on the actual prices paid for approximately 3,000 sterling bills by Nathan Trotter's Philadelphia-based metals importing firm.

This article examines the impact of gold mining on slavery in colonial Brazil. Crown policies, economic pressures, and gold's role as an instrument for social mobility had demographic repercussions—affecting sexual imbalance, the ratio of slaves to freedmen, the availability and distribution of labor. Economic factors determined ethnic origins, slave trade patterns, and the assimilative capability of blacks as illustrated by the slave family. Differences between slavery in mining and plantation societies are emphasized. The transfer of technical skills is signalled as a major African contribution to the New World. The article concludes by assessing the psychological and administrative impact of a black majority.

This article tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across the states from 1880 to 1950. Human capital matters to a state's income level and to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South, whose overwhelmingly agricultural society relied more heavily on work experience than formal education, and whose racial discrimination in school resource allocation lowered human capital accumulation of both blacks and whites, presents a unique pattern. The South's low human capital levels following the Civil War and its active postbellum resistance to education reduced its speed of conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation.

I use rice prices in three cities to analyze the efficiency of the marketing system and the institutional framework of Javanese agriculture, 1823–1853. I show that imperfections in rural capital markets caused the extreme fluctuations in rice prices and that the segmentation of the capital market modifies the McCloskey and Nash interpretation of the relationship between seasonal fluctuations of grain (or rice) prices and interest rates. I argue that these fluctuations proxy peasants' stress. Finally, I hypothesize that institutional and market failures explain the “noneconomic” behavior of Javanese peasants in Boeke's theory of dualistic economic development.

The idea that a monopolist would adopt a pricing strategy to deter entry is found in a wide body of research. We explore why the monopolist in the American telephone industry, AT&T, did not pursue such a strategy when its initial patents expired.

Our tentative estimates indicate that total factor productivity growth in the agricultural sector advanced at a rate between 0.2 and 0.3 percent per year during the colonial period and then remained constant for the remainder of the century, while labor productivity advanced at an average rate of about 0.4 percent over the colonial period. We point out the many difficulties encountered in making such estimates and hope that our contribution will serve as a guide for further research in early American agricultural history as well as help to increase our understanding of the rate and trend in growth of the early American economy.

In his classic paper on the significance of railroads to American economic development, Leland Jenks distinguished three principal avenues of influence: (1) The railroad was what Jenks called an “innovating idea” with important psychological impact “manifested in a wave-like profusion of new enterprise of many sorts.” (2) The railroad and railway construction and maintenance were a stimulus to the industrial and financial sectors of the economy. The railroad not only stimulated the iron and steel, timber, and other industries directly but “encouraged innovations in financial enterprise.” (3) Finally, the railroad contributed directly to the generation of national income through the rendering of transportation services. Although on this last point Jenks despaired that, “There appears to be no satisfactory technique for giving a precise measure to the extent of this contribution.”

Revisiting an old debate between “traditional” historians and “New” economic historians about the short-run monetary effects of President Jackson's war on the Second Bank, I offer new arguments for the traditionalists. I develop a framework accounting for growth in commercial bank credit based on the “investment club” characteristics of antebellum state-chartered banking and apply it to state bank balance sheet data for 1830–1836. The removal of the Second Bank indeed magnified the boom in commercial banking, and the replacement of Second Bank branches with state-chartered banks as lenders and federal government depositories amplified the boom in frontier lands and state debt.

Motion pictures constituted a revolutionary new technology that transformed entertainment—a rival, labor-intensive service—into a non-rival commodity. Combining growth accounting with a new output concept shows productivity growth in entertainment surpassed that in any manufacturing industry between 1900 and 1938. Productivity growth in personal services was not stagnant by definition, as current understanding has it, but instead was unparalleled in some cases. Motion pictures’ contribution to aggregate GDP and TFP growth was much smaller than that of general purpose technologies steam, railways, and electricity, but not insignificant. An observer might have noted that “motion pictures are everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

“So long as the number of persons who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any singer will make an advance on the £10,000 said to have been earned in a season by Mrs. Billington at the beginning of the last century, nearly as great as that which the business leaders of the present generation have made on the last.”1

Alfred Marshall

We examine the impact of rigorous trade suppression during 1550–1567 on the sharp rise of piracy in this period of Ming China. By analyzing a uniquely constructed historical data set, we find that the enforcement of a “sea (trade) ban” policy led to a rise in pirate attacks that was 1.3 times greater among the coastal prefectures more suitable for silk manufactures—our proxy for greater trade potential. Our study illuminates the conflicts in which China subsequently engaged with the Western powers, conflicts that eventually resulted in the forced abandonment of its long upheld autarkic principle.

The debasement of the Byzantine gold coin during the reign of Constantine IX Monomachus (1042–1055) marked the end of more than seven centuries of near stability and the beginning of a sharp fall in the coin's gold content. I reject a widely accepted view that the debasement was caused by the increase in the number of transactions in an expanding economy. I explain the debasement as being a measure undertaken to finance the protracted war against the Pechenegs in the latter half of Constantine's reign.I would like to thank Judith Herrin for her help and encouragement and for first suggesting that I look at this problem. I would also like to thank this JOURNAL's editor and three anonymous referees whose comments and recommendations significantly improved this article. Finally, thanks are also due to Richard Brealey, Ian Cooper, Michael Crawford, Julian Franks, Jonathan Goodman, Mervyn King, Michael Metcalf, Robert Mundell, Anthony Neuberger, and Gabriel Stein.