The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the Ostrom (2007, 2009) framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide the construction of a model of this transition. An increase in the resource price leads the owner to prefer communal harvesting, which simplifies monitoring against theft. I support this framework with evidence from colonial court records. “Palm cutting always cause palaver.”

I examine the effects of an unearned income transfer on the retirement rates and living arrangements of black Union Army veterans. I find that blacks were more than twice as responsive as whites to income transfers in their retirement decisions and 6 to 8 times as responsive in their choice of independent living arrangements. My findings have implications for understanding racial differences in rates of retirement and independent living at the beginning of the twentieth century, the rise in retirement prior to 1930, and the subsequent convergence in black-white retirement rates and living arrangements.

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.

Societies usually do not define explicitly the criteria of the legitimacy of the penetration of the price-system into different areas, and I suppose that, as social scientists, we should be grateful for this omission, since this is the kind of thing that forms the basis of our livelihood.

Economic historians have always recognized the importance of changes in population to any investigation of economic growth or well-being. The payments to labor in every economy, even the highly industrialized modern economies, always constitute the bulk of national income when figured via the factor payments method. Hence what happens to the size and rate of compensation of the labor force is crucial to any economic history. With this in mind we present below new decade population and labor force estimates as a first step toward understanding the overall growth of seventeenth-century New England.

The economy of North Carolina in the early colonial period was agrarian. Land was a central element in the wealth stock and it was distributed unevenly among households. This paper analyzes the distribution of land by means of multiple regression models employing measures of the principal life events of households. This paper analyzes the distribution of land by means of multiple regression models employing measures of the principal life events of households. The data are drawn from an eastern community, Perquimans County, and refer to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

In this paper we stratify a sample of 24 countries by the role of agriculture in industrial growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and focus on systematic differences in the nature and strength of the interactions of institutional with agricultural and industrial change. A novel technique, disjoint principal components models, is applied to categorized data representing 35 facets of social, economic, and political structure and institutions. The results stress the systematic variations in the impact of land institutions among countries with different levels and structures of development. They also underline the critical role of social and political forces in differentiating among paths of economic change. Finally, they highlight the need for cross-section studies using institutional data to understand better the complexity of institutional constraints and influences which often vary little in a given national environment.

Italian sources have so far furnished the principal materials for the study of medieval business history in the Mediterranean area. Florence, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, it seems fair to say, were the cradles of important commercial institutions. For their merchant guilds, sea loan contracts, and various forms of business organization, other Mediterranean towns were largely in debt to the Italian cities. In Catalonia, a region that experienced a remarkable expansion of overseas trade during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the borrowing and adaptation of Italian institutions were continuous. But in Barcelona, the presumptive birthplace of the Llibre del consolat de mar, the early development of deposit banking and marine insurance law was a product of Catalan initiative. It is highly possible that the rich historical archives of Barcelona will also yield important data for the study of early life-insurance and annuity practices.

The initiating forces and contributing factors in the contraction of economic activity during the Great Depression have received a good deal of attention from students of economic history. The occurrence of concomitant falls in the price level and income level during the 1929–1934 depression period has often been cited as evidence of the real-balance effect's lack of empirical significance. In light of the recent developments in monetary theory regarding the contribution of demand deposit creation to net wealth, some reappraisal of the role of monetary wealth as a stabilizing influence in the depression period seems in order. The purpose of this article is to examine the endogenous determinants of the deposit ratios during a severe economic downturn and their relation to cyclical changes in the price level by which changes in business activity affect the stock of demand deposits, bank reserves, and thus the stock of bonds held by banks.

Financial relationships between the federal government and the states were a critical matter in the founding and early operations of the federal government under the Constitution, with the settlement of the Revolutionary War debt the object of chief concern. When the debt was ultimately secured, other matters arose to keep funds passing from one level of government to another. Some of these were of major political importance, while others involving substantial sums made little political impact, being less controversial.

Professor Goodrich had indicated that my function is to discuss the relevance of the concept of economic growth to the tasks of the economic historian. But I hope I may be forgiven if I touch incidentally on other sensitive and overworked areas—notably the relationship between theory and quantity on the one hand and history on the other. If the study of economic growth still meant what it did in Adam Smith's day there might be no need to be so cavalier—there might even be no need to hold this session. But a good number of intellectual bridges have fallen into the water since 1776 and it is surely necessary to examine this new construction with an eye not only to its permanence but to its utility.

A survey of the financial history of France in the years from 1781 through 1787 reveals two interrelated developments: an unprecedented series of loans opened by the state in an effort to meet growing war and postwar expenses and to service a burdensome debt, and a speculative boom which thrived on the confusion of public and private finance which the French revenue system allowed. Both developments are of central importance in any inquiry into public finance in the decade, and thus in any explanation of the financial origins of the French Revolution. Both were fed in part by the unprecedented volume of capital and credit available on the Parisian Bourse as on other European capital markets in this decade. But to an extent too little comprehended, both the increase in public indebtedness and the speculative boom were assisted by investments from abroad, investments which helped to obscure the enormous and onerous public debt in a mask of apparent soundness by responding readily to repeated calls for credit, and which likewise helped sustain the speculative mania through the extension of credit to the speculators themselves. It is known that Genevan, Genoan, and Dutch credit played some role in these events. Indeed, Genevan commitments have, to a degree, been clarified. But the Genoan and Dutch roles have remained vague, always cited but never detailed. What will be attempted here is an analysis of the Dutch role, of the structure and method of Dutch investments in France during this period in which such investments made some contribution to maintaining the appearance of public solvency while assisting Bourse expansion.