This article analyzes the ownership structures and governance institutions of New York's corporations in the 1820s, using a new dataset collected from the records of the state's 1823 capital tax, and from the corporate charters. In contrast to Berle and Means's account of the development of the corporation, the results indicate that many firms were dominated by large shareholders, who were represented on the firms' boards, and held sweeping power to utilize the firms' resources for their own benefit. To address this problem, many firms configured their voting rights in a way that curtailed the power of large investors.

The Panama Canal was one of the largest public investments of its time. In the first decade of its operation, the canal produced significant social returns for the United States. Most of these returns were due to the transportation of petroleum from California to the East Coast. The United States also succeeded in leveraging the threat of military force to obtain a much better deal from the Panamanian government than it could have negotiated otherwise.

This article analyzes asset pricing behavior during the period leading up to the Crisis of 1873. Evidence is presented that equities, options, and bonds priced risks consistently, suggesting that investors were actively monitoring the risk of investing and were not caught up in an irrational, speculative mania. Implied probability density functions for stock returns suggest that option markets exhibited growing concern about substantial price declines prior to the crash. Concerns were concentrated on riskier, more leveraged firms. Deteriorating balance sheet fundamentals for the riskiest U.S. railroads set the stage for a market disruption in 1873 as information asymmetries worsened.

Like the rest of the poor periphery, Mexico fought with de-industrialization in the century before the 1870s. Yet, Mexican manufacturing defended itself better than did the rest of the poor periphery. Why Mexican exceptionalism? This article decomposes the sources of de-industrialization into productivity events abroad, globalization forces connecting Mexico to those markets, and domestic forces. It uses a neo-Ricardian model to implement the decomposition, advocates a price dual approach, and develops a new price and wage data base. Mexican exceptionalism was due to weaker Dutch disease effects, better wage competitiveness, and the policy autonomy to foster industry.

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic literature. Although blacks and whites today reach similar terminal statures in the United States, nineteenth-century African American statures were consistently shorter than those of whites. Greater insolation (vitamin D production) is documented here to be associated with taller black statures. Black farmers were taller than workers in other occupations, and, ironically, black youth statures increased during the antebellum period and decreased with slavery's elimination.

This article reexamines the economics of premodern apprenticeship in England. I present new data showing that a high proportion of apprenticeships in seventeenth-century London ended before the term of service was finished. I then propose a new account of how training costs and repayments were distributed over the apprenticeship contract such that neither master nor apprentice risked significant loss from early termination. This new account fits both the characteristics of premodern apprenticeship and what is known about the acquisition of skills in modern and premodern societies.

This article explores how injuries, sickness, and the geographic mobility of Union Army veterans while in service affected their postservice migrations. Wartime wounds and illnesses significantly diminished the geographic mobility of veterans after the war. Geographic moves while carrying out military missions had strong positive effects on their postservice geographic mobility. Geographic moves while in service also influenced the choice of destination among the migrants. I discuss some implications of the results for the elements of self-selection in migration, the roles of different types of information in migration decisions, and the overall impact of the Civil War on geographic mobility.

The trend in mean height in the Russian province of Saratov is estimated for birth cohorts from 1755 to 1892 on the basis of newly gathered archival data and published sources. Heights fell in the late eighteenth century due an increasing burden of taxes and feudal dues. Stature increased slowly throughout the nineteenth century, offering no support for the hypothesis of an agrarian crisis that provoked or followed from the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Improving living conditions can be attributed to economic development, rising productivity in agriculture, and diversification of peasant economic activity into other sectors.

This response offers a critical appraisal of the claim of Albrecht Ritschl to have found a possible resolution to what he calls the Anglo-German industrial productivity puzzle, which arose as the result of a new industrial production index produced in an earlier paper by the same author. Projection back from a widely accepted 1935/36 benchmark using the Ritschl index showed German industrial labor productivity in 1907 substantially higher than in Britain. This presented a puzzle for at least two reasons. First, other comparative information from the pre—World War I period, such as wages, seems difficult to square with much higher German labor productivity at this time. Second, a direct benchmark estimate produced by Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop, using production census information for Britain and industrial survey material of similar quality for Germany, suggested broadly equal labor productivity in 1907. Broadberry and Burhop also showed that if Walther Hoffmann's industrial output index was used instead of the Ritschl index for Germany, the puzzle largely disappeared.