This article examines where consensus does and does not exist among American economic historians by analyzing the results of a questionnaire mailed to 178 randomly selected members of the Economic History Association. The questions address many of the important debates in American economic history. The answers show consensus on a number of issues, but substantial disagreement in many areas—including the causes of the Great Depression and the aftermath of emancipation. They also expose some areas of disagreement between historians and economists.

Estimates of total and per capita product for Barbados are derived for 1665 and 1666 and 1699 to 1701 from trade statistics and new data on the distribution and composition of produce entered into the customs books of the island. The share of exports in total product–central to the estimate of total product–is linked to the share of the labor force in the export sector. Per capita Barbados product is estimated to have been one- to two-thirds higher than in England and Wales, and per capita exports are estimated well above those of their Chesapeake counterparts.

The image of the “backward” immigrant has enjoyed a prominent place in American history, in large part because of the perceived “non-American” fertility behavior of many immigrant groups. The European perspective on these migrants, however, has been to see them as innovators, breaking free from the demographic constraints of the Old World. Drawing upon a large sample of reconstituted Norwegian immigrant families, this article examines the rising and then declining fertility of this group over the second half of the nineteenth century. It concludes that their fertility experience was influenced both by cultural tenacity and economic opportunity.

The Bank of England depleted its open-market portfolio by secretly sterilizing large gold inflows. Thereafter interest rates were influenced by manipulating reported gold flows. Expectations manipulation as a monetary policy channel is modeled and estimated. A gold flow falsification was over two-thirds as effective as an open-market operation. These results contradict accepted new classical models and suggest that credibility benefits from new classical policy are small, despite current popularity among central bankers. The episode supports Peter Temin’s view of interwar central bankers as nonstabilizers and enforcers of a dysfunctional classical orthodoxy.

Even in a country whose patron saint is the Horatio Alger hero, there is no parallel to their [the Japanese American] success strory.

The view that Japanese and other Asian Americans constituted an economic success story gained popularity in the mass media and among scholars during the 1960s. At a time when the demands of the Civil Rights movement were challenging the government to redress the racism ingrown in American society, Japanese and other Asian Americans were often held up as “model minorities” who had overcome discrimination through their own efforts and without aid from government laws or service programs2. This practise has led to a debate over both the extent of the successs of Asian Americans and the reasons for their economic achievement3.

Steven Hahn, in his influential book The Roots of Southern Populism, viewed Populism in the Georgia Up-country as the culmination of a long-standing protest against the economic and social effects of commercialization in regions that were relatively isolated prior to the Civil War. In developing his explanation for the rise of Populism, Hahn emphasized the close relationship between voting for Populism in the 1890s and voting to keep the range open in the 1880s. The traditional agricultural practice in the South through the Civil War was to allow animals to roam the countryside freely and to force farmers to erect fences around their crops.

This study uses a sample drawn from the 1880 Manuscript Census of Colorado to investigate the influence of individual and regional characteristics on the labor force participation rates of both single and married women in areas with different production characteristics. Results show that the determinants of labor force participation differ considerably for single and married women, but they also show strong consistency within each group. Labor force participation rates are also influenced by general economic and social conditions.

In a recent article in this JOURNAL, Peter Rappoport and Eugene N. White (hereafter R-W) conclude that, “while there is still room for skepticism [of the presence of a bubble in the boom and bust stock market of 1928/29], the traditional accounts of a bubble in the market cannot be so easily dismissed”.1 Their conclusion is not based on econometric evidence for a stock market bubble per Se. Instead, it is based solely on their interpretation of the widening spread between the interest rates on brokers’ loans (call and time loans collateralized by stocks and bonds) and other money market interest rates in 1928 and 1929.

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

Few economic historians have addressed the impact of poor health on economic productivity.1 This relationship, neglected and poorly understood, is the subject of my dissertation. Specifically, the dissertation examines the effect of a chronic debilitating disease on agricultural productivity in the American South between 1860 and 1940. As is well known, per capita gross agricultural output dropped sharply during the Civil War decade and remained low until 1910. Contrary to what one would expect, between 1870 and 1910 agricultural output was lowest in sandy soil regions and highest in regions composed mostly of clay soil. A rapid expansion of per capita agricultural output occurred after 1910. The income decline of the Civil War decade and subsequent increase of the post-1910 era were also related to soil region, with the greatest income swing occurring in sandy soil regions.

The United States population has grown older. Increases in life expectancy and a low fertility rate have dramatically changed the composition of the population. This change in the age composition of the population has led to concerns over the viability of the Social Security system. One way to increase the solvency of the Social Security system would be to increase participation rates among the elderly.

Our best estimates fail to reveal significant quantitative changes in the level of macroeconomic variables (such as per capita output or the savings rate) for Britain during the eighteenth century.1 Efforts that investigate economic activity at the industrial level are, therefore, well placed if the concept of Industrial Revolution is to remain useful. For example, N. F. R. Crafts and T. C. Mills use a segmented quadratic-trend model of industrial production and find that the trend rate of growth accelerated in 1776.2 In addition, my own research has revealed trend acceleration for industrial-level patented invention in the 1760-to-1790 period, which is consistent with Joel Mokyr’s argument that the essence of the Industrial Revolution was a cluster of pivotal “macroinventions” made in this period.3