Between 1812 and 1815, the United States authorized five Treasury note issues. In total, over $36 million in denominations of $3 to $1000 were emitted. The last issue included small circulating notes in denominations of less than $100. Because of the shortage of adequate circulating medium and revenue to conduct the War of 1812, these notes proved to be extremely useful as they were transferable by delivery and receivable for duties, taxes, and public use at par plus accrued interest. They also served as interest-bearing reserves for banks since they were convertible into any kind of money and bore interest simultaneously. The success of the Treasury notes was demonstrated by the fact that they were fully subscribed and accepted by the banks and merchants. In addition, the small Treasury note issues of 1815 indirectly served to increase the circulating medium of the country. They were used to buy goods and services by individuals, pay custom duties by merchants, and acted as cash reserves for banks, preventing bank notes from being discounted. They thus became the first circulating paper currency issued by the United States after ratification of the Constitution.

Historians and economists have long been in need of index numbers to measure both the volume (real value) of activity that is undertaken to produce process or product innovations over time, and also a counterpart index that might capture the outcome of that activity (the volume of inventions) that come on stream year after year. For purposes of measurement the first index can in principle be equated (within tolerable limits of accuracy) with the real annual expenditures on research and development as recorded (at least for recent times) in governmental, corporate, company, and other accounts. Alas, for years before 1914 national or even industry-wide research and development expenditures are very rarely recorded in a form that might allow for the construction of an index number.

Economic interests, ideas, and politics have been put forward as explanations for the Repeal of the British Corn Laws. This article evaluates these competing explanations using the case of the Belgian Corn Laws between 1834 and 1873. A detailed quantitative analysis assesses the success of party affiliation and personal and constituency economic interests in predicting representatives' voting behavior. These factors prove to be insufficient to explain the shift towards free trade. This article then moves on to a qualitative analysis, which points to the importance of political strategy and ideas in the liberalization of corn tariffs.

This paper studies the evolution of mate preferences throughout the twentieth century in France. I digitized all the matrimonial ads published in France’s best-selling monthly magazine from 1928 to 1994. Using dictionary-based methods, I show that mate preferences were mostly stable during the Great Depression, WWII, and the ensuing economic boom. These preferences started transforming in the late 1960s when economic criteria were progressively replaced by personality criteria. The timing coincides with profound family and demographic changes in French society. These findings suggest that, in the search for a long-term partner, non-material needs have replaced material ones.

It is a widely held belief that significant wage rate differentials existed between Britain and the United States during the period 1790–1830. Indeed, the existence of such differentials is a pivotal factor in at least one theory of the nature and rate of growth of American and British technology and in the explanation of relative factor combinations in the two countries during the nineteenth century.

Did preparations for the Second World War account for the precipitous drop in the growth rate of Soviet industrial production from 10–12 percent per annum in the period 1928–1937 to only 2–3 percent per annum in the period 1937–1940? According to some who study the Soviet economy the answer is “yes.” This view has been succinctly expressed by Stanley Cohn: “After 1937, the rising spectre of Hitler forced the Soviet leadership to shift resources into armaments on a massive scale. As a result, the growth rate fell drastically to 3.6 percent per year between 1937 and 1940.” Such a sequence of events, however, has never been empirically demonstrated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate formally the validity of this explanation, via aggregate production functions, particularly of the CES (constant elasticity of substitution) variety, as well as to explore an alternative hypothesis, espoused, among others, by Naum Jasny, Alec Nove and Warren Nutter. This hypothesis stresses a domestic factor as the major contributor to the disruption in industrial production: namely, the impact of Stalin's terror in the form of chaos-producing political purges.

Levels of nutrition among British worker's households in the late nineteenth century have been much debated. Trevon Logan (2006, 2009) estimated a very low average level of available calories. This paper re-examines the data and finds average levels of available calories much more in line with existing studies, more in line with what is known about energy requirements, and more in line with other aspects of the data. In sum, British households were likely to have been significantly better fed than Logan reports.

In the early nineteenth century, five versions of stationary steam engines were in widespread use. In America, the high-pressure engine was dominant in the West, but on the eastern seaboard the low-pressure engine was viable. In Britain, the low-pressure engine was overwhelmingly dominant. Here we analyze the evidence on cost and performance of high- and low-pressure engines, and show that fuel-price and interest-rate differentials were sufficient to explain the distribution of steam engine types in America.

It may seem odd to disinter an economic theory—in this instance, William Stanley Jevons's claim that sunspots caused macroeconomic fluctuations—which no one now believes or much cares about. In fact, my purpose is not to scoff at a dead theory, but to use it as a pretext to discuss the following issues: economic historians often have suggested a dichotomy between a premodem and industrial macroeconomy, with the premodern economy largely at the mercy of weather and other natural phenomena; the dichotomy is rooted in early neoclassical economic theory (here restricting ourselves to Jevons); there is little historical evidence that premodern macro fluctuations were caused by natural disturbances, such as the weather (here restricting ourselves to the case of England); and the above three theses have some interesting implications for the way economic policy is conceived, both then and now.

The paper examines the economic role played by poor relief in early nineteenth-century England. A three-equation model is estimated to explain cross-parish variations in per capita relief expenditures, agricultural laborers' annual wage income, and unemployment rates. Relief expenditures are found to be related to crop mix, the political power of labor-hiring farmers, distance from London, and employment opportunities in cottage industry. The results strongly support the revisionist analysis of the Old Poor Law, and reject the analysis contained in the Report of the Royal Poor Law Commission.

The countryside of Europe in the Roman period was one of dispersed villas and farmsteads placed in a regular grid. That of post-Roman Europe was one of nucleated villages surrounded by irregular fields and “spider's web” tracks. The change occurred between the sixth and the ninth centuries, when the countryside was largely emptied of its population. The reasons for this change should be explored, for this reconstruction of the countryside was the start of the medieval economic expansion that gave Europe a density of population and intensity of land exploitation it had never before achieved.

During World War II the United States attempted to prevent Germany from acquiring wolfram (tungsten ore) in Spain by buying it in the open market. Preemptive buying forced the Germans to pay more for and to consume less tungsten, a material crucial for the production of machine tools and armor-piercing shells. The income provided an important incentive for Spain to remain neutral. The naval blockade and the relatively low elasticity of the supply of wolfram contributed to the success of the wolfram-buying campaign.

The most interesting and distinctive feature of the first Bank of the United States was its nation-wide operation through a system of branches. It is difficult to present an even reasonably definitive analysis of that system. The records available, although more adequate than formerly, are still sadly incomplete. Enough is known, however, to reveal many complexities, political, entrepreneurial and administrative. This paper is designed to offer only a rather sketchy treatment of the following phases or aspects of the subject: prototypes and predecessors of the Bank with special reference to branch-banking; the establishment of the eight branches of the Bank; the actual operation of the branches; and the relative measure of their liquidity when the Bank was subjected to the acid test of winding up its affairs.

We present new estimates of the outcomes of first-generation Mexicans and their descendants between 1880 and 1940. We find zero convergence of the economic gap between Mexicans and non-Mexican whites across three generations. The great-grandchildren of immigrants also had fewer years of education. Slow convergence is not simply due to an inheritance of poverty; rather, Mexican Americans had worse outcomes conditional on the father’s economic status. However, the gap between third-generation Mexican Americans and non-Mexican whites is about half the size today as it was in 1940, suggesting that barriers to Mexican American progress have significantly decreased over time.

Analysis indicates that the Yoruba were taller than other West African peoples in the early nineteenth century. Disease, workloads, and environmental or genetic factors explain little of this differential. Rather, it appears due to a superior nutritional status made possible by Yoruba social structures, in particular, Yoruba towns. Yoruba stature declined both absolutely and relatively over the forty years corresponding to the collapse of the Oyo Empire. Regression analysis suggests a systematic relationship between these two events.

Between 1815 and 1850, the economic policy of England was marked by several far-reaching reforms advocated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and their disciples. Revision of monetary and banking policy, abandonment of the archaic Navigation Acts, and eventual repeal of the Corn Laws, all bear the unmistakable impress of the influence of the classical economists.

In the nineteenth century, the British were popular throughout the west coast of South America as the cultural and economic allies of the ruling elites. The criollos of Peru and Chile, who had inherited the colonial social order, looked to France in matters of art and fashion but viewed the British as the providers of commerce and economic progress. They welcomed Irish, Welsh, and English immigrants as merchants, artisans, and prospective grooms. In Peru, the British played a key role in developing the market for guano (the fertilizer composed of bird excrement and the precursor of the nitrate, salitre, trade), and British ships took Chile's copper and wheat to England from the 1840's through the early 1870's. By 1870, the development of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the London Bank of Mexico and South America assured the British dominance of the commerce along the west coast.