This article examines the relationship between capital market development and industrial structure during the early stages of industrialization, contrasting the experiences of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. It argues that constraints placed on the formation of credit intermediaries in Latin America by poorly defined property rights and government regulatory policies produced greater concentration in the Mexican and Brazilian cotton textile industries than that which developed in the United States.

This article attempts to provide a new view of how the bimetallic standard was maintained before 1873 and how it came to change into a monometallic gold standard between 1870 and 1880. The conventional view that the gold standard emerged out of the contradictions of bimetallism is not persuasive. Instead, this article claims that bimetallism might have survived and provides an alternative explanation of the emergence of the gold standard. Political and historical factors proved essential in precipitating the uncoordinated emergence of the international gold standard.

The partition of German Togoland after World War I provides a natural experiment to test the impact of British and French colonization. Using data of recruits to the Ghanaian colonial army 1908–1955, we find that literacy and religious affiliation diverge at the border between the parts of Togoland under British and French control as early as in the 1920s. We partly attribute this to policies towards missionary schools. The divergence is only visible in the South where educational and evangelization efforts were strong. Contemporary survey data show that border effects that began in colonial times still persist today.

This study is intended as a confirmation of the global presence of the economic institution to which, for want of a better word, we have given the name “port of trade.”

Reliance on a “representative firm” approach in studying industrial behavior during the Great Depression obscures economically interesting patterns. A newly discovered data source lets us form and study an establishment-level panel dataset on the motor vehicles industry, one of the largest in 1929. Substantial intraindustry heterogeneity led to large composition effects in employment, output, and productivity: the large number of plants that shut down were unlike the continuing ones. Oddly, output does not seem to have shifted among continuing producers to the relatively low-cost ones. Reconciling these should illuminate links between industrial organization and macroeconomics.

The effects of the G.I. Bill on collegiate attainment may have differed for black and white Americans owing to differential returns to education and differences in opportunities at colleges and universities, with men in the South facing explicitly segregated colleges. The empirical evidence suggests that World War II and the availability of G.I. benefits had a substantial and positive impact on the educational attainment of white men and black men born outside the South. However, for those black veterans likely to be limited to the South in their educational choices, the G.I. Bill had little effect on collegiate outcomes.

This article reexamines the economics of premodern apprenticeship in England. I present new data showing that a high proportion of apprenticeships in seventeenth-century London ended before the term of service was finished. I then propose a new account of how training costs and repayments were distributed over the apprenticeship contract such that neither master nor apprentice risked significant loss from early termination. This new account fits both the characteristics of premodern apprenticeship and what is known about the acquisition of skills in modern and premodern societies.

This article offers a new quantitative history of the market for government debt in France before the Revolution. The monarchy was a persistent default risk because of institutional obstacles to raising taxes. Default followed observable rules in targeting specific assets. The financial market reflected both facts: interest rates were high on the safest assets and ranged higher on the most likely default targets. The cost of all forms of new borrowing became substantially higher than the yields on old debt, resulting in increasing government reliance on expensive life annuities.

We construct the first time-series for Portugal’s per capita GDP for 1527–1850, drawing on a new database. Starting in the early 1630s there was a highly persistent upward trend which accelerated after 1710 and peaked 40 years later. At that point, per capita income was high by European standards, though behind the most advanced Western European economies. But as the second half of the eighteenth century unfolded, a phase of economic decline was initiated. This continued into the nineteenth century, and by 1850 per capita incomes were not different from what they had been in the early 1530s.

The British Industrial Revolution is reviewed in the light of recent developments in modeling economic growth. It is argued that ”endogenous innovation” models may be useful in this context particularly for understanding why total factor productivity growth rose only slowly. ”Macroinventions” were central to economic development in this period, however, and these are best seen as exogenous technological shocks. Although new growth theorists would easily identify higher growth potential in eighteenth-century Britain than in France, explaining the timing of the acceleration in growth remains elusive. A research agenda to develop further insights from new growth ideas is proposed.

Comparative methods are used to examine two hypotheses derived from Wrigley and Schofield's Population History of England. Contrary to their expectations, economic shocks produced greater marriage responses in France than in England, and the early onset of family limitation in France did not increase the responsiveness of marital fertility to living standards in the aggregate. Mortality was strongly dependent on economic shocks only in France prior to 1740. The results question the usefulness of Maithusian models for early modern European economic history.

The skills and knowledge necessary for patentable invention during early American industrialization were widely dispersed among the general population. This endowment permitted a rather elastic supply of patentable ideas over the relevant range as the expansion of markets induced more individuals to invent and innovate.Although a broadening of the ranks of patentees was primarily responsible for the initial acceleration of patenting, the importance of patentees with greater long-term investments in inventive activity increased during later stages of development.

Technological progress depends for its success on a conducive social environment. The resistance to innovation is identified as a central element governing the success of new inventions. Such resistance usually takes the form of non-market processes. It consists of vested interests, whose assets are jeopardized by new techniques, as well as by intellectuals who are opposed to new technology on principle. The role of resistance in the British and French economies during the Industrial Revolution is assessed.

In the South after 1865, workers and property owners employed a variety of contracts—wage payment, crop sharing, and land rental—to bring together cooperating resources in agricultural production. The contractual mix varied over time and space, depending on the relative resource endowments of the contracting parties, the prevailing risk conditions, and the transactions costs of alternative contractual arrangements. To understand the contractual mix, certain empirical distinctions must be made, and the major hypotheses advanced to explain the mix must be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. These hypotheses, however, differ in their demonstrated ability to account for the empirical variance. In addition to factual clarification and theoretical explication, the paper presents a new sample of plantation data and a new econometric procedure for performing more detailed and better controlled tests of hypotheses.

Understanding long-term changes in human well-being is central to understanding the consequences of economic development. An extensive anthropometric literature purports to show that heights in the United States declined between the 1830s and the 1890s, which is when the U.S. economy modernized. Most anthropometric research contends that declining heights reflect the negative health consequences of industrialization and urbanization. This interpretation, however, relies on sources subject to selection bias. Our meta-analysis shows that the declining height during industrialization emerges primarily in selected samples. We also develop a parsimonious diagnostic test that reveals, but does not correct for, selection bias in height samples. When applied to four representative height samples, the diagnostic provides compelling evidence of selection.

Fundamental to the Malthusian model of pre-industrial society is the assumption that higher income increased reproductive success. Despite the seemingly inescapable logic of this model, its empirical support is weak. We examine the link between income and net fertility using data from wills on reproductive success, social status and income for England 1585–1638. We find that for this society, close to a Malthusian equilibrium, wealth robustly predicted reproductive success. The richest testators left twice as many children as the poorest. Consequently, in this static economy, social mobility was predominantly downwards. The result extends back to at least 1250 in England.

A general transaction cost framework is developed to analyze the costs of exchange and the role of government in the costs of exchange. Three general types of exchange are specified: personal exchange, exchange without third-party enforcement, and exchange with third-party enforcement. The framework is then employed to analyze government and the costs of exchange in history.

By surveying contemporary sources this article reveals direct evidence for the involvement of the South Sea Company in the passage of the Bubble Act. The dominant position of the Company and of its national debt conversion scheme in the affairs of England in 1720 support the conclusion that the act was in fact a piece of special-interest legislation for the Company. The short-term interest that motivated the enactment, together with the limited legal and economic effects of the act, minimized its significance as a turning point in the long-term development of the English joint-stock company.

Witnesses' accounts are used to analyze changes in working hours between 1750 and 1800. Two findings stand out. The article demonstrates that the information contained in witnesses' accounts allows us to reconstruct historical time-budgets and provides extensive tests of the new method. Estimates of annual labor input in 1749/63 and 1799/1803 are presented. It emerges that the number of annual working hours changed rapidly between the middle and the of the eighteenth century. These findings have important implications for the issue of total factor productivity during the Industrial Revolution.

This review article examines the development of state capacity—the extractive and productive power of states— in European history. To explain the historical evolution of state capacity, I focus on the role of political innovations. I relate state capacity improvements to long-run economic growth and the establishment of twentieth-century welfare states. The article concludes with historical lessons for developing nations today.