The bullion famine, manifested in chronic balance-of-payments deficits with the East, is widely cited as the cause of the great depression of the Renaissance. Adapting the monetary approach to the balance-of-payments model to the medieval commodity money setting this article shows that western Europe could not suffer a balance-of-payments deficits and bullion shortage simultaneously. New data show that it is unlikely that France suffered a shortage of silver from 1360 to 1415. Minting volumes diverged between regions according to economic fortunes. Excess silver stocks were likely hoarded rather than exported.

Turkey imposed a controversial tax on wealth to finance the army in 1942. This tax was arbitrarily assessed and fell disproportionately on non-Muslim minorities. We study the heterogeneous impact of this tax on firms by assembling a new dataset of all enterprises in Istanbul between 1926 and 1950. We find that the tax led to the liquidation of non-Muslim-owned firms, which were older and more productive, reduced the formation of new businesses with non-Muslim owners, and replaced them with frailer Muslim-owned startups. The tax helped “nationalize” the Turkish economy, but had negative implications for productivity and growth.

The 1940s marked a turning point in the labor market outcomes of African-American women. They experienced large wage gains relative to white women, sharp declines in agricultural and domestic service work, and significant increases in formal sector employment. Using a semiparametric decomposition technique, we assess the influence of changes in productive and personal characteristics, in workers' distribution across occupations and locations, and in the wage structure on both black women's absolute wage gains and those relative to white women's. We argue that the pattern of changes is most consistent with increasing demand for their labor in the formal sector.

The Maryland Gazette for 18 October 1749 carried an obituary of more than common interest:

On the Eleventh Instant Died, at his Seat on Wye River in Queen Anne's County, Richard Bennett, Esq. in the Eighty-third Year of his Age, generally lamented by all that knew him. As his great fortune enabled him to do much good, so (happily for many) his Inclination was equal to his Ability, to relieve the indigent and distressed, which he did very liberally, without regarding of what Party, Religion or Country, they were. As he was the greatest Trader in this Province, so great Numbers fell in his Debt, and a more merciful Creditor could not be, having never deprived the Widows or Orphans of his Debtors of a Support; and when what the Debtors left, was not sufficient for that purpose, frequently supply'd the deficiency. His long Experience and great Knowledge in Business, as well as his known Candor and generosity, occasion'd many to apply to him for Advice and Assistance, and none were ever disappointed of what was in his Power, and several by his means, extricated out of great Difficulties ….

Monetary and economic difficulties in the United States in the 1830's and early 1840's have been attributed by some writers to the struggle between the supporters of Andrew Jackson's “hard currency” and Nicholas Biddle's “Second Bank.”

This paper reports new calculations of foreign investment in Russia between 1881 and 1913. As the major recipient of foreign capital under the gold standard, Russia provides an ideal case study of capital flows among countries. The conclusions are that the influx of foreign investment into Russia following convertibility was much more substantial than the early estimates suggested and that the Russian growth rate was raised by about 0.5 percent annually as a consequence of the gold standard. The major cost of achieving convertibility was that two-thirds of official borrowing abroad between 1885 and 1897 was used to acquire gold reserves, but the ensuing growth benefits which are estimated far outweigh these costs. The Russian case confirms the standard portfolio theory of capital movements, and the relationship between the demand and supply of fiat money explains observed variations in the exchange rate.

This study examines the Florentine economy and women's role in it from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The changes that took place in the Florentine economy as it adapted to new economic opportunities undermine the notion of economic decline and suggest instead considerable resilience. The changes that took place helped to produce and were themselves the product of the growing participation of women in the economy.

Debate over the level of economic development for the Eastern Cherokees was heated during the 1830s. Removal opponents argued that the Cherokees had adopted white agricultural methods, whereas advocates of removal maintained that little evidence of progress existed. Removal advocates believed that Cherokee economic progress required that they be removed from contact with whites. This article examines the statistical record to show that a majority of Cherokee households produced surplus food before removal. The large number of Cherokee households producing surpluses before removal suggests the existence of significant rents to be transmitted to white farmers via the removal policy.

In 1791 the $10 million capitalization of the First Bank of the United States was vastly greater than the combined capital of all other banks. The Bank had an enormous impact on the economy within two months of opening its doors for business by flooding the market with its discounts and banknotes and then sharply reversing course and curtailing liquidity. Although the added liquidity initially helped push a rising securities market higher, the subsequent drain caused the first U.S. securities market crash by forcing speculators to sell their stocks. Several reasons are analyzed for the Bank's credit restriction.

“Mr. Jay Gould doth at this hour bestride the narrow Wall Street like a colossus. He is indeed the Autolycus of the western world. No pickpocket, either ancient or modern, has been more successful.” Such florid mixing of metaphors, even in the late Victorian era of railroad chaos, was rare for the financial editor of the staid London Railway Times. He had just read the plan by which the arch “robber baron” proposed to reorganize the wobbly, poorly integrated and ill-financed Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway that Gould had sought to build out of at least two dozen railroads between Kansas City and Detroit. The editor's indignation a few weeks earlier is not recorded, but it was doubtless monumental, for on May 28, 1884 Gould had successfully sent his lieutenants into a United States District Court in St. Louis with a brazen request for appointment of receivers for the Wabash, under a concept of receivership which broke nearly every important precept of this old branch of equity law.

This paper analyzes the roles of the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior in restricting the assignment of property rights to rangeland in the American West. While common property conditions encouraged overgrazing and dissipation of the rental value of the land, it was in the interest of both departments to oppose the private claims of the ranchers. Moreover, jurisdictional competition for administration of federal land holdings likely delayed the installation of bureaucratic controls on entry and range use until 1934.

An international sample of 349 British-owned firms is analyzed to test the effectiveness of the International Tea Agreements of 1930 and 1933. Although the agreements reduced output overall, in 1930 there were significant regional differences in the extent of compliance, with firms in Eastern India reducing output more than did firms in Ceylon. These differences can be attributed to regional differences in organizational structure. Archival evidence suggests that the breakdown of collusion in 1931 and 1932 was due to a bargaining conflict between established producers in India and Ceylon and the newer plantations of Java and Sumatra.

Producers of commodities like wheat and sugar may envy the facility with which the tea growing industry obtained a 30 percent rise in average tea prices and a 90 percent enhancement of tea share values—all within the space of a little more than six months.

The Economist, 26 August 1933

Two series of the dollar-sterling exchange rate are presented for the 1791–1834 period, both series based on actual transactions and corrected for the component of interest in bills of exchange and for episodes of floating exchange rates. Expressed as deviations from a true parity measure and conjoined with existing data for 1835–1900, the series permit an examination of the stability of the gold points over the entire nineteenth century. The steady narrowing of metallic points, previously found for 1835–1900 and confirmed here, does not apply to the earlier period; but evidence suggests that movement to an integrated market in foreign exchange developed in the 1820s.

During the 1920s the New York Stock Exchange's position as the dominant American exchange was eroding. Costs to customers, measured as bid-ask spreads, spiked when surging inflows of orders collided with the constraint created by a fixed number of brokers. The NYSE's management proposed and the membership approved a 25 percent increase in the number of seats by issuing a quarter-seat dividend to all members. An event study reveals that the aggregate value of the NYSE rose in anticipation of improved competitiveness. These expectations were justified as bid-ask spreads became less sensitive to peak volume days.

Using data from a sample of over 2,000 individual strikes in the United States from 1881 to 1894 this article examines geographic, industrial, and temporal variations in the use of strikebreakers and the sources from which they were recruited. The use of strikebrekers was not correlated with business cycle and did not vary appreciably by region or city size, but employers located outside the Northeast or in smaller cities were more likely to use replacement workers recruited from other places. The use of strikebreakers also varied considerably across industries, and was affected by union authorization and strike size.

During the 1920s, federal personal income tax rates, which had been dramatically increased during World War I, were sharply reduced. These tax rate cuts have often been cited as an example of a successful supply-side policy, but they have also been criticized as policies designed primarily to benefit the wealthy. We argue that a primary motive for the tax cuts of the 1920s was the desire to reduce the tax avoidance by wealthier individuals that occurred as a result of the previous tax rate increases and that the tax cuts enacted did reduce tax avoidance.

Translator's introduction: To understand the significance of this paper, the American reader should recall that, as Talcott Parsons says, German “idealistic empiricism” led to a repudiation of analytical social and economic theory “in favor of the concrete uniqueness and individuality of all things human.” The “general analytical level of scientific comprehension [was] a priori excluded” from the field of human action. Understanding of things human “in terms of the concrete individuality of the specific historical case became the goal.” Professor Arthur Spiethoff, once a student, later an assistant, of Gustav von Schmoller, and a friend of Edwin F. Gay while the latter studied in Berlin, moved away from that point of view. He recognized analytical theory as a legitimate subject and thereby deviated from what can be considered the typical nineteenth-century German attitude.

The introduction and diffusion of what Alfred Chandler called modern business enterprise had a profound capital-saving impact on the American economy. Given the availability of the railroad and telegraph, purchasing more managerial labor services paid off principally via increased speed of production and inventory turnover, which spread costs of holding capital over a larger volume of output. This article challenges the consensus that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century technological change in the United States was overwhelmingly labor saving and interprets the factor-saving bias of modern business enterprise as representative rather than anomalous.

This paper is concerned with the relative efficiency of farming in open fields or enclosures in England. It uses surveys covering the acreage, yield, and output of the principal grain crops for the period 1795–1801, initially concentrating in some detail on selected but widely distributed English counties before concluding with a section which summarizes the data for England. Efficiency meant improvements in per unit acre yields and in total parish output. But it also had important implications for total agricultural productivity because the land which was saved by improved farming in enclosures was used to promote a better balance between arable and animal farming.