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.

Extensive amounts of geographic mobility and high rates of labor turnover before World War I gave rise to the notion that the industrial labor force was “casual” and “impermanent.” But data from firms' payrolls and from nineteenth-century surveys conducted by state labor statistics bureaus show that male workers averaged about four years of experience in their current jobs. Data from an 1892 survey of San Francisco workers show that the average non-union male could expect to remain with his current employer almost 13 years.

The bull and bear markets of this century have suggested that large stock market swings reflect irrational “fads and fashions.” We argue instead that investors perceived shifts in the long-run rate of future growth and that stock prices are sufficiently sensitive to expectations about the future that these perceived shifts plausibly generated the swings of the twentieth century. We document that analysts often viewed as “smart money” assessed fundamentals, based on their perceptions of future economic growth, in a way that tracked decade-to-decade swings closely.

In 1816 England officially abandoned bimetallism and made silver coins into tokens that were only limited legal tender. Earlier monetary authorities had lacked the ability to manage a subsidiary coinage, a necessary complement to the monometallic gold standard. A successful token coinage must be both costly to counterfeit and credibly backed to ensure that the tokens do not depreciate to their intrinsic value. These problems were solved in the nineteenth century through the introduction of steam-driven stamping presses and with the assistance of the Bank of England.

The motivation and structure of various banking insurance experiments in U.S. history are analyzed, along with their political alternative, branch banks. In both the antebellum period and in the 1920s, insurance systems that relied on self-regulation, made credible by mutual liability, were successful, while compulsory state systems were not. Branch banking increased stability and resiliency to shocks.

Recent theory has predicted that if competing technologies operate under dynamic increasing returns, one, possibly inferior, technology will dominate the market. The history of nuclear power technology is used to illustrate these results. Light water is considered inferior to other technologies, yet it dominates the market for power reactors. This is largely due to the early adoption and heavy development by the U.S. Navy of light water for submarine propulsion. When a market for civilian power emerged, light water had a large head start, and by the time other technologies were ready to enter the market, light water was entrenched.

This article argues against the mainstream view that eighteenth-century common rights were of little significance to working people. Markets in common rights and in their products provide an index of value, and when neither common rights nor derived products were bought and sold, values are imputed from the market prices of similar goods. Since women and children were the primary exploiters of common rights, their loss led to changes in women's economic position within the family and more generally to increased dependence of whole families on wages and wage earners.

The article reexamines the connection between rural landownership and income distribution in light of recent evidence suggesting economic growth in China in the early twentieth century. The study utilizes a government-organized national survey of landholding and income-earning in 1930s’ China and three household-level village surveys conducted by Japanese researchers in the 1930s. Our investigations produce evidence contrary to the currently held view of substantial (and increasing) income inequality. We suggest an alternative scenario of economic opportunities.

Population pressure has been identified as a major force behind the transition from traditional property rights in land to exclusive, transferable property rights. This article examines the case of Hawaii where the transition to private property in land occurred while its population was rapidly declining. That transition was driven by new market opportunities and considerations of public finance.The shift in comparative advantage to sugar production increased the rents associated with private land rights, while declining tax revenues prompted the king and his government to pursue property rights reform to gain additional revenues.

The only official measure of overall Soviet munitions output in World War II, first published in 1965, was based on changes in values, not volumes, and grossly understates change in the level of real Soviet war production. Subsequently published official data on production of ground and air munitions in physical units, supplemented by information about real spending on naval munitions, provide foundations for a new index. During the war the USSR produced more munitions than Great Britain or Germany, but much less than the United States.

The sustained unemployment in the United States during the recovery from the Great Depression has proved difficult to explain, as has the rapid elimination of unemployment in Germany. I argue that employment in the United States was restricted by high wages, which government policy raised above the level of efficiency wages. Socialist control and military expansion by the Nazis reduced unemployment, but also held down consumption.

Economists have emphasized supply-side learning when explaining long-term trends in racial income differences. This article demonstrates that learning also occurred on the demand side. Estimation of a state-dependence model of the sequence of racial employment outcomes of firms in Cincinnati, Ohio, during World War I shows that the introduction of black workers into a previously all-white firm generated new experiences within the firm, altering its future racial employment decisions.This suggests that more research should be done on how firms and labor markets processed information about workers and how that influenced worker opportunities.

This article examines the workers' standard of living in the cotton textile industry of Northwest England from 1806 to 1850. Hedonic earnings regressions using 1835 data suggest that power-loom weavers required substantial compensation for the high rents and poor sanitation of urban locations. Adjusting earnings in the factory sector for the impact of urbanization cuts growth in living standards by 10 percent, or up to one-quarter of gains realized by 1850. Inclusion of those employed in the handloom sector implies that any improvements in the living standards of all workers in the industry appeared only during the 1840s.

Several macroeconomic studies have found evidence of diminishing cyclical wage flexibility in the United States since the turn of the century. But the importance of wage reductions during downturns must be questioned even for the era of allegedly flexible wages. This article shows that during the severe contractions of 1893 and 1908 only a small minority of Ohio manufacturing workers experienced cuts in their wage rates.The apparent downward flexibility of average earnings in these data was largely the consequence of changes in the occupational composition of the employed work force rather than pay cuts for individual workers.

The problem of controlling overseas managers confronts all multilocational firms. Historians have argued that because of the extreme time lags in communication, chartered companies were unable to control managerial behavior. We argue that not only did the Hudson’s Bay Company understand the agency problem but also put into operation strategies designed to attenuate opportunistic behavior. The company used employment contracts and control systems and established a social structure compatible with the company’s aims.

The State of Israel was established in the midst of a war for its survival, and its population doubled within three years by mass immigration. The Israeli governments opted for a system of far-reaching and direct intervention in the economy as a means of winning the war, meeting basic consumption needs, and sustaining a high investment ratio. The circumstances and ideological premises of this policy are discussed, and the major problems of evaluation spelled out.

Quantiative and qualitative evidence suggest that the returns to irrigation in France were similar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Old Regime failed to develop irrigation because of fragmented political authority over rights of eminent domain. Since many groups could hold projects up, transaction costs increased dramatically. Reforms enacted during the French Revolution reduced the costs of securing rights of eminent domain.

This article examines the geographic integration of U.S. labor markets from 1870 to 1898, using previously unexploited wage and price data for 23 occupations in 12 major cities. In contrast to the increasing nationalization found in other markets at that time, the labor market was characterized by large and persistent real wage differentials both within and between regions, leaving little doubt that late nineteenth-century labor markets remained far from completely integrated. The differentials, however, owed as much to substantial variations in labor demand growth as to the lack of labor market integration.

The article derives a new monthly index of industrial production for the United States for 1884 to 1940. This index improves upon existing measures of industrial production by excluding indirect proxies for industrial activity, using only component series that are consistent over time, and not making ad hoc adjustments to the data. Analysis of the new index shows that it has more within-year volatility than conventional indexes, has relatively unimportant seasonal fluctuations, and has cyclical turning points that are grossly similar to but subtly different from existing series.

A downward trend in British coal-mining productivity was reversed between the world wars. Declining productivity before 1914 was accompanied by wide regional differences, especially at the coalface. Scotland attained the best overall. productivity, while coalface productivity was highest in Durham and Northumberland. Regional differences narrowed by the 1920s but re-emerged in the 1930s, as mines in the North Midlands outpaced the productivity gains made elsewhere. Only a multifaceted interpretation can explain these distinctive patterns—over time, between regions, and at different stages of the coal-mining operation.