Why did state governments begin to regulate the food industry in the late nineteenth century? One possible explanation is that pure food regulation was the result of rent seeking on the part of traditional food producers who wanted to limit the availability of new substitutes. Another potential hypothesis is that regulation was desired because it helped solve an asymmetric information problem in the market for food products. I find the evidence to be more consistent with the latter hypothesis.

This study investigates the relationship between income and fertility in Nuits-Saint-Georges, a small Burgundian town. Nuits offers a rich location to study fertility because of its broad range of occupations, income, and literacy. I constructed a data set that linked fertility through 1792 for couples married between 1744 and 1779 with fiscal records tracking the families' tax payments. Controlling for occupation and literacy, my principle findings were that wealthier families had more births, changes in fertility were positively correlated with increases in income over the life cycle, and marital fertility in Nuits steadily declined over the latter eighteenth century.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner. This article is part of a thesis written under the supervision of Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. The author would like to thank Jean-LaurentRosenthal, Kathleen McGarry, Duncan Thomas, Pia Orrenius, Rosemary Hyson, George Deltas, Aileen Thompson, Shawn Ulrick, three anonymous referees, and two editors at this JOURNAL for many helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.

This article uses a new panel dataset to investigate the relationship between financial fragility and real activity on U.S. railroads during 1929–1940. Leverage had a negative effect on maintenance, within small firms only. Bankruptcy had a positive effect on maintenance and employment, within large firms only. Both leverage and bankruptcy effects were significantly larger during the worst depression years. Had all railroads been bankrupt during 1930–1933, GDP would have increased by 0.2 percent annually, and employment by 0.125 percent annually. Loans by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation had no impact on maintenance or employment.

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.

We provide 16 purchasing-power-parity-adjusted estimates of U.K. and U.S. income per capita and output per worker between 1872 and 1990 based on new estimates of their price levels. Our income benchmarks depart from current estimates in four crucial respects. The United States, not the United Kingdom, led in income per capita in the 1870s. The United Kingdom kept pace with the United States through the late Victorian era. Most of the United Kingdom's relative decline occurred between 1905 and 1950. Finally, the post-1950 performance of the U.K. economy was stronger than is now estimated.We thank Michael Edelstein for getting us interested in the topic. We are also indebted to two referees for comments on the first draft. Susan Carter, Greg Clark, C. Knick Harley, Alan Heston, Peter Lindert, Robert Lipsey, Luis Locay, Bryan Roberts, Christina Romer, Richard Sylla, Jeffrey Williamson, and the participants in a seminar at the University of California, Riverside gave helpful suggestions. Finally we are especially grateful to Deirdre McCloskey for advice at an early stage.

The Solow growth and the Heckscher-Ohlin trade models describe two competing processes through which regional incomes converge over time. Solow's model attributes rising productivity of labor to additional regional capital investments. Heckscher-Ohlin's trade model ascribes the relocation of high value industries to regions with low wage rates. On the other hand Paul Krugman expects incomes to diverge over time as regions with an initial advantage maintain it through ever increasing external economies of scale. The Solow and Heckscher-Ohlin models imply that incomes converge through the movement of high quality labor and capital and high value goods and services into low income regions respectively.

The behavior of principals and agents in the interwar Soviet economy can be studied through the failed attempt to develop a new aviation-engine technology based on the steam turbine. Some possible approaches to the evaluation of R&D failure are outlined. Soviet R&D agents competed for funding within a command system. Principals funded ventures in a context of biased information and adverse selection. In the presence of sunk costs budget constraints on individual projects were often loose, but were tightened periodically. There is evidence of rent seeking, but not that rents were distributed deliberately as political gifts to loyal agents.

The first order of business for the new Congress under the Constitution of 1787 was raising revenue to fund the government's operation and to service the public debt. On 8 April 1789, two days after the first Congress achieved a quorum, James Madison introduced a proposal to levy duties on imported goods. This tariff proposal became one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Congress and was signed by President George Washington on 4 July 1789.The author thanks the National Science Foundation for providing partial research support.

The sixty-fourth annual meeting of the Economic History Association will be held in San Jose, California, 10–12 September 2004, at the Fairmont San Jose. Joel Mokyr, 2003/04 E.H.A. President, announced the theme “Technological Change and Economic Growth in History.”

Using records of individual depositors' accounts, this article provides a detailed microeconomic analysis of two banking panics. The panics of 1854 and 1857 were not characterized by an immediate mass panic of depositors and had important time dimensions. We examine depositor behavior using a hazard model. Contagion was the key factor in 1854 but it created only a local panic. The 1857 panic began with runs by businessmen and banking sophisticates followed by less informed depositors. Evidence suggests that this panic was driven by informational shocks in the face of asymmetric information about the true condition of bank portfolios.

How Economics Became a Mathematical Science. By E. Roy Weintraub. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 313. $54.95, cloth; $18.95, paper.

There are currently two ways of estimating relative levels of per capita income back to the nineteenth century. The most commonly adopted approach, popularized in particular by Angus Maddison and labeled “long-span” estimates by Marianne Ward and John Devereux, is to use time-series projection from a recent benchmark.Maddison, Monitoring; and Ward and Devereux, “Measuring British Decline.” The alternative procedure, labeled “direct estimates” by Ward and Devereux, is to use direct benchmark estimates for earlier years. Ward and Devereux provide some new “direct estimates” which they claim over-turn the conventional chronology of U.K./U.S. relative per capita income levels for the period 1870–1990, derived using “long-span” projections. One important purpose of this note is to dispute the new estimates, and hence to reassert the conventional chronology. Along the way, however, I wish also to make a more general methodological point about the use of time series projections and direct benchmark estimates of relative per capita income levels. In my view, it is unsatisfactory for researchers to note a large discrepancy and simply claim the superiority of one type of evidence over the other. Rather, a satisfactory account of the evolution of relative per capita incomes over a long period should be able to encompass both sorts of evidence.I am grateful to Nick Crafts, Douglas Puffert, Mark Harrison, Douglas Irwin, Angus Maddison, and Mary O'Mahony for comments on an earlier version and to Knick Harley for editorial advice. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.

Reliable data are an indispensable tool in accurately evaluating the evolution of an economy.This dissertation was completed in 2002 at the Department of Economics, Duke University, under the supervision of Michelle Connoly. In reality, economists, much like archeologists, are routinely forced to interpret past events from the statistical artifacts at hand. Because contemporary federal agencies and private organizations infrequently collected economic statistics, definitive facts on the nineteenth-century U.S. business cycle are sparse. Indeed, the notorious void of macroeconomic data for the pre­Civil War period led to Paul David's apt naming of the first half of the nineteenth century as America's “statistical dark age.”David, “New Light.” The reason is simply the deficiency of comprehensive yet reliable annual macroeconomic data for the entire nineteenth century.

Charles P. Kindleberger (1910–2003), noted economic historian, died of a stroke on Monday, 7 July.This piece largely duplicates the author's entry for Kindleberger in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (edited by Joel Mokyr, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Used by permission.

Kindleberger was born in New York City in 1910. He received his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1932 and his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1937. He came to economic history after distinguished careers in public service (including the Federal Reserve and the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War) and teaching international trade at M.I.T. He made his entry into the field with a book on Economic Growth in France and Britain, 1851–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). Kindleberger surveyed the extensive literature on these two countries and concluded that there was no single convincing explanation for the differences between these two countries. He ended the book with the following famous words: “Economic history, like all history, is absorbing, beguiling, great fun. But, for scientific problems, can it be taken seriously?”

In accordance with what has been standard practice, the JEH editorship went through another rotation as of the summer of 2002. Jan De Vries completed his four-year term as editor for the non-North American section, turning over the reins to C. Knick Harley at the University of Western Ontario. The handy cross-bay shuttle system between Berkeley and the North American office at Stanford has thus been replaced by a long-distance, crosscountry axis, thus far without noticeable loss of efficiency.

This edited volume is the result of a series of interdisciplinary conferences and seminars sponsored by the Renaissance Trust between 1990 and 1995 to examine “Achievement in Intellectual and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe” (p. 3). Historians of science, culture, the economy, and architecture and urban design were brought together to reflect on the intersections between past achievements in their respective fields within urban centers, as well as on the transfer of those achievements from one urban place to the next over time. These scholars were also called upon to consider the connections between the findings of more traditional “case-study” urban history and the grand narratives of modern development and geopolitical conflict. All of the contributors to this volume agreed to address the same meta question: “Why do recognized and celebrated achievements, across several fields of endeavor, tend to cluster within cities over relatively short periods of time?” (p. 5). In a schema entirely consistent with the Braudelian paradigm of early modern development (Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. New York, 1981–84.), three cities in particular were chosen as representative of these episodic peaks of early modern achievement: Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in roughly the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries respectively. The chapters of the book are thus organized in groups of three, with one chapter devoted to each area of endeavor in each of the three cities, beginning with their material bases in economic growth and ending with high culture as exemplified by the arts, books, and scientific research and discovery.

SESSION 1A: CONTRACTS, COMMUNITIES, AND THE STATE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

SESSION 1B: INSTITUTIONS, PROPERTY RIGHTS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

SESSION 2A: HUMAN CAPITAL AND SCHOOLING

SESSION 2B: NETWORKS, PATENT RIGHTS, AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE