Standard treatments of U.S. agriculture assert that, before the 1930s, productivity growth was almost exclusively the result of mechanization rather than biological innovations. This article shows that U.S. wheat production witnessed wholesale changes in varieties and cultural practices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without these changes, vast expanses of the wheat belt could not have sustained commercial production and yields everywhere would have plummeted due to the increasing severity of insects, diseases, and weeds. Revised estimates of Parker and Klein’s productivity calculations indicate that biological innovations contributed roughly half of labor-productivity growth between 1839 and 1909.

The United States overtook Britain in comparative aggregate productivity levels primarily as a result of trends in services rather than trends in industry. This occurred during the transition from customized, low-volume, high-margin business organized on the basis of networks to standardized, high-volume, low-margin business with hierarchical management from the 1870s. This transformation from the counting house to the modern office was dependent on technologies that improved communications and information processing. The technologies were slower to diffuse in Britain as a result of lower levels of education and stronger labor-force resistance to intensification.

This article shows that the Whiskey Trust used exclusive dealing and unusually low prices to deter entry and competition. Evidence of this is based on a unique dataset that allows us to estimate a firm-level demand curve for the trust, and to construct direct estimates of marginal cost. This article also shows that the strategies employed by the trust failed to deter entry. Market structure and state-level antitrust enforcement account for the failure of these strategies.

We document how intermediaries shaped markets or, conversely, how market institutions constrained intermediaries. In Dijon, where the Estates of Burgundy’s debt amounted to nearly half of all bonds in that small market, there was limited need for intermediaries. In the 1740s the borrowing needs of the province expanded, and the estates began to borrow in Paris, where their debt remained a small fraction of the market, and where they relied on notaries to place their bonds and to create a secondary market. These developments assured the estates’ capacity to borrow and thus Burgundian autonomy from the French Crown.

We provide evidence that the problem of raising capital in the early days of the U.S. electric-utility industry motivated industry leaders to embrace state rate-of-return regulation in return for a secure territorial monopoly. Utility executives anticipated that this would lead to a reduction in borrowing costs. Using firm-level bond data for 1910–1919, we estimate a model and find that state regulation led to lower borrowing costs but that the magnitude of the reduction was small. We also find evidence that output of electric utilities in states with regulation was higher than output in states without regulation.

This article links the terms of trade, money supply, labor market, and money and credit markets to explore a puzzle in Malayan economic history: why, despite rapid growth and high per capita income, did pre–World War II Malaya industrialize so little? A range of data is drawn together to show how for Malayan manufacturers economic boom was accompanied by precipitate deterioration in the real exchange rate, while in a slump credit contracted sharply and with it the size of the Malayan market for manufactures. Analysis of Malayan experience may be relevant for understanding slight industrialization elsewhere in Southeast Asia.