Although it has not been our practice to publish issues devoted to single themes, the nearly simultaneous submission of three manuscripts treating the economic history of the elderly inspired us to highlight the new research in this area by publishing the articles together and by inviting Professor Stanley Engerman of the University of Rochester to write an introduction.

Using the census survival method to calculate net flows across employment states between 1900 and 1910, we find that approximately one-fifth of all men who reached the age of 55 eventually retired before death. Many of these retirees appear to have planned their withdrawal from paid employment by accumulating assets, becoming self-employed, and then liquidating their assets to provide a stream of income to finance consumption in old age. This “modern” retirement behavior has important implications for the economic history of capital and labor markets, of saving and investment, of insurance and pensions, and of the family economy.

Progressive Ear and New Deal reformers claimed that industrialization impoverished the elderly by degrading older workers. This has become the standard interpretation in popular and scholarly accounts. Data from 1890 through 1950 show that real wages of older workers rose sharply during this peroid and that family economic strategies promised the elderly considerable security. Birth cohort analysis indicates positive age-earnings profiles across the life cycle. Although the elderly benefited from economic growth, security in old age often demanded intrafamilial exchanges. Tensions arising from these transfers may explain the broad popular support Social Security received.

I use Body Mass Index (BMI) to investigate how the ralationship between health status and retirement among older men has changed since 1900. Although BMIs for the elderly were much less healthy in 1900 than today, the BMI level that maximizes labor force participation rates has not changed. However, in 1900 the elasticity of nonparticipation with respect to BMI was greater than it is today, suggesting that health is now less important to the retirement decision than in the past. Other factors (especially rising income) are more important than health in explaining the historical changes in retirement rates.

We use census data and information on large firms to generate descriptions of structural features of Western industry around 1906. We find that although the United States conforms to existing stereotypes, most other nations do not. German industry stands out as having the smallest plants and firms and the lowest concentration levels both in the aggregate and when grouped by industrial classifications. Equally startling, French levels of plant size and concentration are comparable to those of the United States. We speculate on the importance of these results for rethinking the traditional analysis of industrial development in the early twentieth century.

Tenant-right, or a tenant's right to sell his holding, was one of the most puzzling institutions of nineteenth-century Irish land tenure. Historians have argued that the institution reflects the tenants' assertions of a proprietary interest in the land, an assertion often backed up by threats and violence. In this article we argue that landlords respected tenant-right because they could profit from the instistution. Our model reflects comments by contemporaries and explains that tenant-right functioned as a bond aganist nonpayment of rent and was part of a rational landlord's income-maximizing strategy.

An analysis of all appellate cases involving slave-sales reveals that southern courts helped minimize the costs of trading in slaves. Slave-sales law also surpassed other contemporaneous commercial law in sophistication. Why? Greater information gaps between slave buyers and sellers called for more complex institutional support. The enormous property value embodied by slaves also led to more litigation, greater need for settled law, and a more even match of power between plaintiff and defendant. Additionally, legal rules surrounding slave sales substituted for the employment law governing free-labor markets.

Infrastructure construction is often associated with excessive, even corrupt, profits. This article argues that construction profits earned in Spanish railroads in the mid-nineteenth century were a response to the lack of credibility of the Spanish state. It also makes the first attempt to document excess construction profits in Spanish railroads by demonstrating, for example, financial links between railroad stockholders and the providers of construction goods and services and by directly estimating construction profits. The estimated excess construction profits only provided railroad entrepreneurs with a normal rate of return to their entire railroad-related investments.