This article reconstructs the history of mutual assistance among Federal Reserve Banks. We present data on accommodation operations through which Reserve Banks mutualized gold reserves in emergency situations between 1913 and 1960. Reserve sharing was important in response to liquidity crises and bank runs. Such cooperation was essential for the cohesion of the U.S. monetary union. But fortunes could change, with emergency recipients of gold becoming providers. Because imbalances did not endlessly grow, instead narrowing when region-specific shocks subsided, mutual assistance created only limited tensions. These findings speak to the current debate over TARGET2 balances in Europe.

Handloom weaving with a mixture of wool and cotton yarn was common in late nineteenth-century Canada. The hand technology survived using industrial inputs and part-time female labor whose opportunity cost was relatively low in rural areas. The demand for homespun was income-sensitive and reinforced by the cold Canadian climate. The patterns of weaving by men and women differed, but both produced for the market in addition to home consumption. Cloth constituted a significant share of farm production, especially in low-income areas.

This article examines the causes and variation of language standardization across European ethnic groups from a historical perspective. Although language has long garnered interest in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, how language becomes standardized has yet to be offered. In this article, I argue that the acquisition of the printing press is critical to explaining the occurrence and variation of standardization. Using the first publication of vernacular dictionaries as a proxy for standardization, I present a systematic investigation of the standardization process for 171 ethnic groups in Europe from 1400–2000 ce. Empirical tests come from an original data set that collects information on political, economic, and social dimensions. Findings from event history models show that (1) printing press adoption is positively and significantly correlated with vernacular dictionaries; and (2) early adopters are more likely to standardize vernaculars than latecomers.

Cash-crop diffusion in colonial Africa was uneven and defied colonizers’ expectations and efforts, especially for cotton. This study investigates how agricultural seasonality affected African farmers’ cotton adoption, circa 1900–1960. A contrast between British Uganda and the interior of French West Africa demonstrates that a short rainy season and the resulting short farming cycles generated seasonal labor bottlenecks and food security concerns, limiting cotton output. Agricultural seasonality also had wider repercussions, for colonial coercion, investment, and African income-earning strategies. A labor productivity breakthrough in post-colonial Francophone West Africa mitigated the seasonality constraint, facilitating impressive cotton output growth post-1960.

The higher calorie levels reported in Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith (2015) are a function of a conversion of food quantities to calories that is weighted towards contemporary, calorie-rich foods. Their conversion uses the full distribution of contemporary foods and should not be applied to historical populations. Since Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith assume that industrial workers in the past had access to contemporary foods, the revised calorie levels reflect contemporary diets rather than historical diets.

Much has been written concerning the fraudulent and coercive practices that frequently attended the importation of contract laborers into the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In an effort to eliminate these abuses, a great deal of publicity was given to these unsavory practices. In contrast, there is a dearth of documentary evidence on cases in which a contract arrangement was mutually advantageous to both the contract laborer and the employer. Yet there must have been many such instances.

“The town has that sign of prosperity of new buildings, which never deceives,” wrote Arthur Young of Nantes in 1788. In fact, on the eve of the Revolution, Nantes—the infamous ville des négriers (city of the slavers)—was one of the richest cities in France and one of the most important ports in the kingdom. For almost a century Nantes had been the capital of the French slave trade, and by 1789 local merchants were investing almost 10 million L (livres) annually in the trade. Yet, in spite of the general activity, Nantes traders were experiencing difficulties with their business. Although a few slavers managed to create vast fortunes almost overnight, problems in France, the colonies, and Africa meant that most traders had to struggle to obtain even modest profits, from slaving. During the last decade of the old regime investments in the slave trade were usually no more profitable than investments in offices or land, although the trade alone offered the possibility, however, remote, of quick, vast profits.

When tested against U.S. evidence back to the nineteenth century a straight-forward model of wealth accumulation contradicts the belief that “the rich are getting richer.” If the wealth owned by the top 1 percent of American families in 1922 had earned only a modest 8 percent yearly until 1953 then they (or their heirs) would have owned 98 percent of personal wealth—instead of an actual share of 28 percent. The erosion of top wealth groups also appears for 1953–1969, and for 1892 and the years following. The reasons for such erosion, inherent in the structure of U.S. families and of U.S. institutions, are discussed.

A substantial literature exists claiming the adoption of tractors was inefficiently slow. We develop a linear programming model of farms that specifically incorporates the opportunity cost of the farmer's time and apply it to farms in Iowa during the interwar period. We develop technological coefficients derived at the task level, based on the data and agricultural reports from that period. By valuing the time saved by tractors, we demonstrate that the seemingly slow rate of tractor adoption was in fact wealth maximizing. Tractors were widely adopted only after the improvement in implements that came late in this period.

To discuss economic activity in Russia of the eighteenth century is to deal with an economic and social order that antedates the age of industrialization. Industrial activity in Russia during the eighteenth century was carried on within the political framework of an autocratic state, with ill-defined norms of legal behavior, and against the background of a serf agriculture which reached its apogee during this very period. The state of the industrial arts was low in comparison with western European standards, and the use of waterpower as a motive force in manufactories was introduced in Russia by foreign entrepreneurs only in the seventeenth century. Against this background, the efforts by Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725) to modernize Russia appear genuinely heroic. The demands of his policy forced the government to engage directly in a vast program of establishing new industries, of converting small handicraft workshops into large-scale manufactories, and of encouraging private entrepreneurs to follow the government's example.

Scholars have long held strong views about the nature and extent of grain storage in early modern Europe. Direct evidence on the issue is quite poor and inconclusive.1 Randall Nielsen's ambitious attempt at solving the problem in a recent issue of this JOURNAL therefore deserves serious attention.2 Like others before him, Nielsen uses inferences from price behavior in assessing the nature of grain storage. Nielsen identifies three distinguishing implications of profit-maximizing storage for grain price structure.

The material progress of an area, large or small, depends upon its adaptability in facing up to the continuous pressures exerted the world economy. What determines such flexibility remains as yet, despite recent research on this matter, an open question. This investigation of the Aachen-area woolen trades provides no new answer. All it pretends to do is to stress those strategic aspects of the institutional setting which, by their influence upon demand and supply conditions, point to some of the issues that might have relevance for an understanding of this important problem.

Research in finance is guided by powerful intuitions from models of efficient markets. However, researchers have uncovered a number of puzzles that are not explained by these models. Such anomalies include the excess volatility of stock prices, the closed-end mutual fund paradox, and the mean reversion in stock prices that produces predictable returns for long holding periods.1 Whereas financial economists all recognize the existence of these puzzles, they disagree about how they can be explained. Robert J. Shiller argues, for example, that efficient-markets models cannot hope to explain these anomalies and looks to alternatives that incorporate fads.2 In contrast, John H. Cochrane believes that the puzzles can be explained by improved models of fundamentals.3

The relationship between long-term trends in foreign trade and long-term trends in income has long been a source of fascinating speculation for scholars. As early as 1821, Robert Torrens observed that “as the several nations of the world advance in wealth and population, the commercial intercourse between them must gradually become less important and beneficial.” He believed that trade was founded on the exchange of manufactures for foodstuffs and materials; as land became scarcer as a result of population growth, the basis for trade would disappear.

Between 1236 and 1240 the king's estate steward Walter de Burgo improved the productivity of about forty royal manors by systematically increasing agricultural investment to levels four to five times the medieval average. On estates where he managed the inland directly, de Burgo improved the quality of the draft animals and spent large sums on marling, smother crops, and on the purchase of foreign seed. Within four years he raised the net value of these manors 70 percent, thus demonstrating the direct link which could exist between investment levels and productivity in medieval agriculture.

The onset of the Great Depression did not spark a surge in personal bankruptcy. For debtors in default, state garnishment law played a significant role in the decision to file for bankruptcy. Only states that made it easy to garnish a debtor's wages experienced significant increases in bankruptcy as a consequence of the Depression.