During the five years of inflation, price stability, and hyperinflation in Germany after World War I, three factors determined the growth of the money supply. First, the Reichsbank freely issued money in exchange for whatever government or corporate debt the private sector did not wish to hold at the official discount rate. Second, the government persistently ran large deficits. Political instability and the inflation itself prevented taxation adequate to pay for social programs, subsidies to the railroad and businesses, and reparations to the Allies. The third factor was expectations of inflation, which, as they became more pessimistic, led people to hold less and monetize more of the outstanding stock of debt. Thus, the money supply was partly endogenous and partly dependent on government fiscal policy. The monetary policy of the Reichsbank, although essential to the inflation process, was a constant and passive one until stabilization at the end of 1923.

An important change in the structure of U.S. institutions occurred when the government under the Articles of Confederation was replaced by a new government under the Constitution. In 1913, Charles A. Beard proposed a view of the formation of the United States Constitution—an economic interpretation—that remains a much discussed yet unresolved explanation of the behavior and motives of the men who wrote the document. This paper provides the first rigorous statistical test of this issue. We summarize the preliminary results of a statistical analysis of the relationship between the voting behavior of individual delegates involved in the making of the Constitution and their economic and personal characteristics. Contrary to current historical wisdom, significant patterns related to economic interests are found in the voting, with the division of interests generally consistent with that outlined by Charles A. Beard seventy years ago.

Analysis of balance-of-payments components with Spain and Spanish America helps account for spectacular economic gains to the United States in the neutrality years and for the subsequent turn to net deficit positions during the 1810s. Excess export values at constant prices with Spain and favorable terms of trade with Spanish America decisively contributed to large surpluses on commodity account through 1795–1813. Most cycles in merchandise trade are consistent with greater demand elasticities for exports than for imports.Net earings on freight, insurance, and mercantile profits boosted overall returns from the Spanish Empire at the very times when they were most needed to finance the re-export trade and to settle deficits elsewhere.

This paper utilizes a survey of U. S. manufacturing firms from 1832 to investigate the structure of manufacturing investment during early industrialization. The relative magnitudes of investments in fixed and working capital, and how they varied with firm size, location, and industry, are documented. This variation across industries in the composition of capital investments is indicative of a more general variation in factor intensities, and bears on the issues of why industries became concentrated in the regions they did, and the degrees to which they were adversely affected by the limited availability of long–term loans. Evidence that most manufacturing industries had quite modest investments in machinery and tools per unit of labor is also presented, serving to undercut the notion that the early period of industrialization was based on a proliferation of new, machinery–intensive technologies.

The case for government involvement in the provision of elementary education in nineteenth-century England is assessed by presenting estimates of the rate of return to literacy. Before government involvement, the estimated rate of return to male literacy was considerably above the return on most alternative investments in the English economy. The differential narrowed with the onset of government involvement. The evidence is much weaker for any initial underinvestment in female literacy. The contribution to national income from correcting any initial underinvestment in literacy appears to have been modest.