Tradition depicts American business as the chiefexploiter of our national free immigration policy during the latter defender andhalf of the nineteenth century. The contribution of immigrant labor to the building of the American industrial empire is much discussed. The interest of employers in recruiting cheap labor and strikebreakers from Europe is a familiar story. That industrialists and their allies in the years of rapid expansion and mechanization of the American economy stood to gain as much as any other group, even including the aliens themselves, from the maintenance of large-scale immigration has appeared so obvious as to demand little careful investigation. Historians have ordinarily described the succession of laws after 1882, gradually narrowing the “open door” the United States offered to Europe and pulling in the welcome mat as well, as a series of labor and nativist victories in the face of dogged resistance by the business world. Yet such an interpretation fails to explain the fact that the period which saw the growth of strong anti-immigrant feeling among native workers witnessed a strikingly similar development in the ranks of businessmen. During the 1880's and 1890's, while labor leaders protested the competition of alien workers, business publications were criticizing no less bitterly the impact of immigration upon American society. When nativists sought financial support for their efforts to restrict immigration they found many businessmen in sympathy with their aims. Measures presented to Congress for regulating and limiting the admission of aliens were frequently concurred in by prominent business leaders. Indeed, a notable development in American business thought after 1880 was the rise of hostility toward the swarms of cheap foreign laborers which employers had long considered essential to their own, and the nation's, prosperity.

Taking a fresh look at the institutions of economic management in colonial India explains much about the history of the last decades of the raj. The concept of political economy—the interaction of economic forces and political choices—provides a useful approach to the study of government economic policy and practice that can give a new perspective on the history of the late British Empire as a whole.

Why do voters publicly fund education? I examine two explanations: public funds may be a means for decisive voters to transfer wealth to themselves or voters may subsidize the education of others to raise social education levels and realize external benefits. I test these theories in the 1800s, when full tax support of primary schools emerged. States where median and mean wealth was closer together had higher fractions of education revenue from public sources. Attendance rates rose when the public share of education funding rose, especially for poor children. These facts are consistent with a model with external benefits of education.

The Panama Canal was one of the largest public investments of its time. In the first decade of its operation, the canal produced significant social returns for the United States. Most of these returns were due to the transportation of petroleum from California to the East Coast. The United States also succeeded in leveraging the threat of military force to obtain a much better deal from the Panamanian government than it could have negotiated otherwise.

The quantitative international comparison of financial structure and development involves three levels of problems: first, what is the purpose of such comparisons; second, given these objectives, what are the concrete features of the financial system to be compared; and, third, how are these comparisons to be carried out, that is, what data can be used and how should they be processed and arranged?

The Glass-Steagall Act may have increased the cost for corporations of raising external funds for investment spending. Significant differences are found in the way financial institutions influenced corporate investment spending. Investment regressions for a sample of companies affiliated to financial institutions are estimated and compared to those for a control sample. Prior to Glass-Steagall, affiliated companies do not display any sensitivity between investment spending and internal measures of liquidity, whereas the control sample does.

Census and tax data for three counties in the Georgia Piedmont in 1860 and 1880 are used to analyze changes in crop-choice decisions after the Civil War. Although changes in the lower and upper Piedmont were similar, the explanations for these changes in the two areas differ in important respects. In the upper Piedmont the use of fertilizer is a very important explanator, whereas race and tenure are of little significance. Fertilizer is also an important explanator in the lower Piedmont, but so are race, tenure, and poverty of farm operators.

From the end of the Civil War down to 1900, the American agricultural sector was subject to continuous political and social upheaval. While the South and Far West were a part of this movement, the heartland of protest remained in the Midwest. The traditional view has been that this unrest and protest was at least partially based on the worsening economic position of the farmer. Farmers complained of being exploited by moneylenders, victimized by railroads and other middlemen, cheated by speculators and faced with prices received falling faster than prices paid, thus reducing real purchasing power. This last view is put forth by Faulkner: “While the prices of farm commodities declined, those of manufactured products, dominated by monopoly practices, remained high or did not decline proportionally.”

This article presents somewhat-more-direct evidence than has been available on the supply price of labor during the Depression. The new data comprise wages asked from situations-wanted ads for female clerical workers. Between 1929 and 1933 annual average clerical wages asked fell nominally by nearly 58 percent, markedly lower than wages of new or existing employees. Neither changes in labor quality nor self-selection explains the decline. Clerical wages asked fell by roughly the same percentage as did wages paid in agriculture. The data are strongly inconsistent with the market-clearing view of Depression-era labor markets.

State intervention as an obstacle to economic growth and development is a proposition that is especially intriguing in connection with the Habsburg monarchy of the eighteenth century. The posing of the question forces the historian to consider whether it can be applied to the problem of a static society ruled by a dynasty and controlled by a large agglomeration of urban-corporate and rural-manorial structures. What is a state in this context and what are obstacles to economic progress?

It is unnecessary to insist on the differences between the communism of Plato's political writings and the modern political systems and theories of the same name. Politically, economically, and geographically the world of Marx and his followers is different from that of Greece in the fourth century b.c., and even modern Utopias are founded on modern technology.

Climatic and dietary changes may have reduced the incidence of mold poisoning in England and France, 1750–1850, thereby stimulating fertility and reducing mortality. Because mold poisons developed in cereals, the staff of life was often the scepter of death. When people ate less rye and more wheat or less wheat and more potatoes, even without increasing their caloric intake or improving their nutrient balance, their chances of survival improved.

In this provocative book, Hernando de Soto argues that the reason why transitional and developing economies have had such limited success with adopting capitalism is the lack of formal property rights for the urban poor. Without legal ownership of the homes they inhabit or the businesses they operate, the poor live in a shadow economy, subject to high risk of expropriation, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and political corruption. The absence of title thwarts investment, limits markets, dampens incentives, and retards economic growth all round. The comparatively poor performance of many Latin American, African, and Asian economies stems not from cultures that are alien to commercial activity, from the legacy of past colonialism, or from low savings rates among the poor. The urban poor are entrepreneurs, and formal property institutions are needed to free their energies and expand their opportunities, allowing them to accumulate desperately needed capital. Currently, the urban poor are forced to hold their wealth in defective forms. This misallocation cripples developing economies. According to de Soto, the potential gain is huge. He argues that despite their lack of affluence, the poor still save, and in the aggregate the amounts exceed by perhaps 40 times all of the foreign aid sent to developing countries since 1945. Freeing up these savings and entrepreneurial energy could lead to a second industrial revolution, and end the disparities of wealth and well-being that differentiate the developed and developing worlds.

Automobile manufacture is generally regarded as the paradigmatic mass production industry, with large plants able to exploit scale economies. We argue that the radio industry also sheds important light on evolving production technology and determinants of competitive success in inter-war manufacturing. Timothy F. Bresnahan and Daniel M.G. Raff (1991) showed that productivity differences resulting from scale in the auto industry translated into differences in exit rates during the Depression. We find that technical scale economies did not play a large role in the radio industry. Instead selection during the Depression was on non-“technical” productivity factors, including whether or not a plant's parent company owned a brand.

How did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policies? Contrary to the predominant and simplistic view that the system allowed the landed elites to capture most political rents, we find that members of parliament from constituencies with a higher vote inequality support more liberal policies, gauging their political orientation from the universe of roll call votes cast in parliament during Prussia’s rapid industrialization (1867–1903). Consistent with the characteristics of German liberalism that aligned with economic interests of business, the link between vote inequality and liberal voting is stronger in regions with large-scale industry.

The Antebellum American South experienced rapid biological innovation centered around an active market for new cotton seed varieties, despite the absence of intellectual property rights. Contemporaries complained new seed was initially offered at high prices, which subsequently collapsed. Using local newspaper evidence, this paper documents this market’s operation. It then rationalizes the price movements given the potential of improved seed to multiply at finite rates. The initial prices were sufficiently high to provide meaningful incentives to innovate. This study also identifies information problems affecting the cotton seed market, leading observers to claim too many new varieties were released, not too few.

This article shows that the Whiskey Trust used exclusive dealing and unusually low prices to deter entry and competition. Evidence of this is based on a unique dataset that allows us to estimate a firm-level demand curve for the trust, and to construct direct estimates of marginal cost. This article also shows that the strategies employed by the trust failed to deter entry. Market structure and state-level antitrust enforcement account for the failure of these strategies.

Milton Friedman and I have been engaged for some time in a study of the characteristic behavior of the quantity of money over long periods in relation to income, prices, and interest rates m the United States and the United Kingdom. In our study, our observations of levels are the average annual values of each variable during cyclical phases, starting with the expansion phase of 1878–1882 in the United States and 1879–1883 in the United Kingdom, and ending with the final phase that can be marked off for each country, respectively, 1969–1970 and 1968–1969. In all, we have forty-five observations of levels for the United States, and thirtythree for the United Kingdom. In addition to levels of observation, we also examine rates of change, which we express as the slopes of least-squares lines connecting three successive phase averages. For each country, the rate-of-change observations are two fewer than the number of level observations.

Demand for farm products grew, and the cost of marketing them shrank, between 1860 and 1880. The resulting commercialization of Midwestern agriculture has been widely discussed, but the production strategies that farmers pursued have not been adequately described or modeled. I find that an endowment-contingent model of crop choice provides a consistent explanation for farm production strategies at the micro-level on Missouri farms. The results call for a re-examination of the conventional wisdom that commercialization fostered specialization at the regional level.