This paper is concerned with the semipiratical entrepreneurs who roamed the United States virtually unchecked before 1903, save for who the opposition of a few publicists and some short-lived vigilante committees. Contemporaries, following Henry Demarest Lloyd and Carl Schurz, likened businessmen of this type to the nobles who infested the Medieval Rhine. The term “robber barons” has stuck to them through the years despite occasional attempts at rehabilitating one or another who stood out above the throng by virtue of his accumulations or philanthropy. Only recently, for example, Howard Mumford Jones distinguished between the “cruelty” and the “culture” of these magnates whose behavior in the commercial-political and the artistic-literary fields he prefers to liken to the “commercial tyrants” of the Renaissance. No one to date, so far as I know, has attempted to distinguish from their strictly buccaneering activities the permanent contributions made by these businessmen as a group to American business practices. Such is the purpose of this paper.

Municipal involvement in the finance of fine arts museums raises the question: Just which market failure serves to rationalize this public subsidy? Two contenders are prominent in the literature: decreasing costs and education externalities. The relationship of price to marginal cost provides an operational test to distinguish among the two rationales. Scattered data from the 1880s and 1890s as well as contemporary discussion indicate that, implausible as it may seem now, education externalities constituted the operational justification for the public subsidy.

In the past decade the question of the degree of mutual economic dependence among the three major regions of the antebellum United States—Northeast, South, and West—has received considerable discussion. Good indicators of the degree of dependence would be ratios of the interregional trade flows of particular commodities to the amounts of those commodities produced locally in each region. Trade data are available, however, only in limited series for major cities or commercial areas. Since comprehensive trade flows cannot be measured directly, various indirect approaches to the question have been employed.

This paper re–examines the naval reserve oil leases issued by Interior Secretary Fall in 1922 that led to the Teapot Dome controversy. The analysis shows that the leases were the only efficient oil rights arrangement on federal lands through 1930. They were superior to either the naval oil storage policy practiced prior to 1922 or to the general leasing practices found on other federal land. Nevertheless, they were attacked by conservation groups and small oil firms and cancelled in 1922. To explain the opposition to the leases, this paper examines interagency and interest group rivalries for control of federal land. During the period preceding Teapot Dome, the federal government began withholding title to vast tracts of land, and issues of agency jurisdiction and interest group access had not been resolved. The paper concludes that Teapot Dome had little to do with oil conservation and more to do with settling jurisdictional disputes over federal land. The Teapot Dome controversy led to the establishment of the Federal Oil Conservation Board.

In “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature,” I calculated that the spinning jenny was profitable to install in England in the 1780s but not in France.1 My calculations assumed that a spinner using a wheel in a domestic setting worked a total of 100 days per year and spun 100 pounds of coarse cotton (one pound per day). The jenny raised labor productivity to three pounds per day in the “most likely” scenario. I showed that it would have been cheaper to spin 100 pounds per year with a jenny than with a wheel in England, while the reverse would have been true in France. Hence, the jenny was installed in England rather than France. Ugo Gragnolati, Daniele Moschella, and Emanuele Pugliese have pointed out that this argument assumes that output was kept at 100 pounds per year, and the effect of the jenny was to reduce the spinner's work year to only 33–1/3 days per year.2 They suggest that it was more likely that the spinner would have continued to work 100 days per year and produce 300 pounds of yarn instead. In that case, they argue, it would have been profitable to install the jenny in France as well as England. Profitability would have increased in both countries under these assumptions because capital costs would have been cut by a third if three times as much output was produced from the same capital (although profitability was still much higher in England). Hence, they conclude that economic considerations do not explain the diffusion of the jenny.

Beliefs shape the choices of institutions. Beliefs are generally stable, but shocks that cause sufficiently unexpected economic and political outcomes make beliefs malleable. Within these windows of opportunity, leadership can play a role in shaping a new belief among the dominant organizations that in turn generates new institutions and over time a possible transition to a new developmental trajectory.

During the nineteenth century, the U.S. birthrate fell by half. While previous economic literature has emphasized demand-side explanations for this decline, many of these arguments are confounded by changes in the supply of technologies to control fertility. I exploit the introduction of state laws governing American women's access to abortion to measure the effect of changes in the supply of fertility technologies on the number of children born. I estimate an increase in the birthrate of 4 to 15 percent when abortion is restricted. I also explore the legal characteristics and political economy of these laws.

The active opposition to technical change has frequently impeded economic growth. This article examines the widespread resistance to government-led campaigns to use new tuberculin testing technologies to eradicate bovine tuberculosis in the United States. We explore three issues: the political economy of opposition; the role of earlier scientific controversies in the discourse; and the techniques used by the opponents. Over time, the protests shifted from challenging the scientific merits of the testing technology to more nuts-and-bolts distributional and administrative issues.

This article estimates the contribution of farm household members to agricultural output in the antebellum northern United States. I reject the hypothesis that children contributed more in the least settled regions. The contribution of young children and teenage females was greatest in the Old Northwest; teenage boys made their largest contribution in the Northeast. In the Midwest young males and females performed the same tasks, namely market production and land clearing, but in the Northeast males were more likely to specialize in market production and females in household production.

The main purpose of this paper is to compare the rates of industrial A growth in various periods of Russian history from the middle of the eighties until the end of the interwar period and to describe briefly the specific factors that promoted or obstructed the process of industrialization of the country. While no definitive conclusions are reached, some of the similarities and differences between industrial developments before and after 1914 are pointed out in the last section of this paper. History in the conditional mood is an enticing pastime. However, I have successfully withstood the temptation to concentrate on estimates of the relative level of industrial output that Russia might have attained in the absence of a revolution.

In recent years a number of papers have appeared offering explanations of the long-noted, long-unresolved note issue paradox in both the free and national banking eras. Some have argued that previous profit calculations overstate the true cost of note issue because they fail to account for risks and costs that are not easily modeled. Others have argued that profit calculations are reasonably accurate and demonstrate that the bankers acted irrationally in failing to reap easily gathered profits. Yet another approach radically modified the basis of the calculation and found potential profits to be quite small. This note offers an explanation overlooked by most previous studies: that although note issue was profitable, a more profitable avenue existed. Because of legal and institutional restrictions, banks found it more profitable at the margin to create deposits rather than issue notes in extending credit.

The locomotive industry was one of the relatively sophisticated “high tech” sectors in which Italy, a late industrializer, was successful before 1913. Using technical data on the performance of different vintages of locomotives, we construct a new industry-level index of technical change. We also study the impact of different policy instruments (import duties, non-tariff trade barriers, and other discretionary interventions) in shaping the development of the industry. Our reassessment reveals not only the sound technological performance of Italian locomotives and successful industry growth, but also the critical role played by non-tariff barriers for the development of the industry.

This article uses a new dataset of 330 slaving voyages to examine terms of credit issued for British American slave sales between 1755 and 1807. It shows that credit terms consistently varied between American colonies, and that slave ship captains considered these differences when electing where to land enslaved Africans. Our dataset also shows that credit terms were highly erratic, especially in the last quarter of the century, contributing to both surges and collapses in the slave trade to individual colonies, and in the trade as a whole. Four such instances are examined in detail to show that instability in credit terms played an important and hitherto unacknowledged role in the volume and direction of Britain's trans-Atlantic slave trade in the second one-half of the eighteenth century.

This article analyzes asset pricing behavior during the period leading up to the Crisis of 1873. Evidence is presented that equities, options, and bonds priced risks consistently, suggesting that investors were actively monitoring the risk of investing and were not caught up in an irrational, speculative mania. Implied probability density functions for stock returns suggest that option markets exhibited growing concern about substantial price declines prior to the crash. Concerns were concentrated on riskier, more leveraged firms. Deteriorating balance sheet fundamentals for the riskiest U.S. railroads set the stage for a market disruption in 1873 as information asymmetries worsened.

Labor productivity in German manufacturing lagged persistently behind the United States in the early twentieth century. Traditionally, this is attributed to dichotomous technology paths across the Atlantic. However, various industry case studies suggest rapid diffusion of U.S. technologies in Germany. We develop a novel decomposition framework based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to reconcile these findings. We conclude that by 1936 inefficient assimilation of modern production techniques—and not the use of different techniques—accounted for most of the U.S./German labor-productivity gap. Our findings call for a reappraisal of the drivers behind cross-country differences in manufacturing performance.

In the study of Roman money Theodore Mommsen remains 135 years after his work a towering figure, more pragmatic than theoretical in his economics, yet still sound. He saw the politics in monetary history, and especially its connection with the strength of the state. His view is more penetrating than MV = PT, fashionable in twentieth-century scholarship on Rome. And it is better economics than offered by the Polanyi School as the alternative line of analysis. The Polanyists infer an absence of a Roman monetary system from the failure of some part to be as sophisticated as the best. On the contrary, the Roman monetary system does not look so different from that of Europe since Mommsen wrote, uneven in its use of monetary devices, but sensibly so.

When examining the various aspects of Soviet society, and looking back at its antecedents in pre-revolutionary Russia, a certain continuity in institutions and economic policies emerges. This is in particular true in the area of banking and credit. The Soviet banking system, as it evolved after the October revolution, and, more specifically, after the credit reforms of 1930–1932, is unique in many respects. Surely, there are examples in non-socialist countries of banking institutions which combine central banking and commercial banking. In many cases, central banks of the less developed countries have assumed a leading role in implementing development programs and in creating the required financial institutions, instruments, and markets. In some leading industrial countries, such as France and Italy, as well as in a number of the newer countries, large commercial banks are owned by the government. The uniqueness of the Soviet banking system lies in the complete integration of monetary processes within the system of central planning, the credit monopoly of the State Bank of the Soviet Union (Gosbank) and its broad control powers over the performance of the entire state-owned segment of the economy.

France has been well characterized by Raymond Aron, following de Tocqueville, as Immuable et changeante. Nowhere does variability (across space) combine more strongly with stability (in time) than in the economy of rural France in the nineteenth century. Judging again by titles, we must give higher marks to the author of The Eternal Order of the Fields than to the man who argued that Capitalism and Agriculture were growing ever closer, to the advantage of the former.