In 1930, the West—for present purposes, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado—had a level of per capita income payments that stood at 79 per cent of the national figure. In that same year, the figure for the South—Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—was 51 per cent.

We test for wage discrimination and occupational crowding in the nineteenthcentury American whaling industry. Although our results indicate little evidence of wage discrimination, we cannot reject the hypothesis that certain groups—specifically blacks and Portuguese–experienced some occupational crowding, though it was by no means complete and the minority-dominated occupations were not low-paying ones. In addition, we find that members of the majority group—white American and Northern European seamen—did accept a negative compensating wage differential for working with members of their own group.

If problems of historical study are to be chosen on the basis of their importance in affecting the course of human affairs through time, no phase of life in Western culture during the century and a half after 1800 is more worthy of study than that of economic development. During these one hundred and fifty years there was an increment of total production within western Europe of an estimated 1,500 per cent and an increase of output per capita of some 500 per cent. At no time in history had an equal advance been made at such a rapid pace.

The labor markets in the railroad industry went through extensive institutional changes between 1890 and 1945. Federal laws increased railroad employers' liability for workplace accidents in several stages. Unions expanded to cover more occupations. The federal government set railroad wages during World War I and then mediated and arbitrated a large number of collective bargaining disputes between 1920 and 1945. We examine how these changes in institutions affected compensating differentials for fatal and nonfatal accident risk. The increasing role of unionization and government intervention coincided with a decline in the size of compensating differentials.

The hypothesis that a region's or nation's laggard industrial development can be explained by its relatively more expensive supplies of coal and iron ore is challenged here. A simple model, based on location theory, is developed. Using this model, I demonstrate the conditions under which this hypothesis holds. A case study of Quebec and Ontario industry suggests that the differential resource cost hypothesis seriously lacks explanatory power.

Although the aggregate growth rate of the American economy was relatively slow between the Revolution and 1840, certain sectors did expand at a rapid rate, and from these sectors originated some of the factors responsible for the later dynamic growth of the whole system. One such sector involved the making of clocks. Never large by any measure, the clock industry was, nevertheless, a leader in the introduction of the system of interchangeable parts production and in the mass marketing of a “luxury” consumer good. The purpose of this article is to outline and to analyze the transformation of this activity from a craft to an industry and, in particular, to indicate the factors which influenced Eli Terry, the main entrepreneur of the transformation.

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.

The 1858 discovery of crude oil in Ontario led to the development of a refining industry initially composed of many small firms. Ontario's refiners relied upon generous tariff protection in order to compete with cheaper, higher-quality imports. We apply a regime-switching model to the pattern of monthly wholesale prices to find the extent to which trade policy affected collusive efforts. Tariff protection encouraged collusion, but ease of entry resulted in frequent price wars. An 1877 downward revision in tariffs, while reducing the gains to collusion, also reduced the likelihood of entry and supported efforts to rationalize capacity.

A novel series of interest rates paid by the Corporation of London shows that interest rates in London declined by 350 basis points during the seventeenth century. The decline followed a similar pattern in Europe. Records from the Corporation’s archive provide evidence for financial development: an increase in the number and volume of debt instruments, an increase in the number of lenders, and the development of a secondary market. Econometric analysis establishes that increasing the debt instruments’ liquidity contributed to the convergence of interest rates between London and Amsterdam.

I present evidence that shocks to the Medieval English harvest persisted. Hypothesized mechanisms include varying supplies of seed corn and other complementary harvest inputs. Peasants are modeled as trading off current consumption against grain stores and sow rates so that subsistence-level shocks may persist. For my sample I find that a failed harvest increased the probability of subsequent harvest failure by 20–30 percent. Grain yields are analyzed as a strongly balanced panel by year, manor, and crop. While I reject the hypothesis that harvests were self-contained annual events, I caution against linking harvest persistence directly to runs in grain prices.

The idea that a monopolist would adopt a pricing strategy to deter entry is found in a wide body of research. We explore why the monopolist in the American telephone industry, AT&T, did not pursue such a strategy when its initial patents expired.

This article tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across the states from 1880 to 1950. Human capital matters to a state's income level and to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South, whose overwhelmingly agricultural society relied more heavily on work experience than formal education, and whose racial discrimination in school resource allocation lowered human capital accumulation of both blacks and whites, presents a unique pattern. The South's low human capital levels following the Civil War and its active postbellum resistance to education reduced its speed of conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation.

For many Western countries the history of the last two centuries reveals both a sustained rise in per capita output and a tendency toward a more equal distribution of the economic product. The experience has been characterized, however, by repetitive fluctuations in the levels and growth rates of aggregate production and its components. The length of the shorter of these fluctuations, the business cycle, ranges from the 40- to 45-month inventory cycle to the so-called Juglar of seven to ten years. Two other classes of interruptions in the secular trend have also been singled out for study by economic historians. The first is the Kondratieff cycle, a movement of roughly fifty years which has been primarily identified in price series. The second is the Kuznets cycle, or “long swing,” which in length is between the Juglar and the Kondratieff. The long swing constitutes the primary theme of this study.

Our tentative estimates indicate that total factor productivity growth in the agricultural sector advanced at a rate between 0.2 and 0.3 percent per year during the colonial period and then remained constant for the remainder of the century, while labor productivity advanced at an average rate of about 0.4 percent over the colonial period. We point out the many difficulties encountered in making such estimates and hope that our contribution will serve as a guide for further research in early American agricultural history as well as help to increase our understanding of the rate and trend in growth of the early American economy.

This paper uses numismatic sources to estimate the volume of unaccounted currency issued during the middle two quarters of the nineteenth century. “Unaccounted currency” includes any currency issued by private business firms and by municipal and state governments. This money, unlike state bank notes and deposits and federal government currencies, was issued illegally, and not recorded in conventional statistical sources. Exact quantification, therefore, is next to impossible. The principal significance of this phenomenon is the credibility it gives to private competitive issues of money.

Negative shocks to childhood health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual by altering families' schooling investment decisions. This article introduces a new dataset of brothers serving in World War II and uses it to demonstrate that improvements in childhood health led to substantial increases in educational attainment in the first one-half of the twentieth century. By exploiting variation in health within families, the data show that this relationship between childhood health and educational attainment holds even after controlling for both observed and unobserved household and environmental characteristics.

We analyze all slave manifests housed at the National Archives—some 24,400 documents involving approximately 135,000 slaves who were transported in the coastwise trade from 1810 to 1861. The manifests list the name of the owner or shipper, which allows us to match names with traders found in other sources. We also utilize demographic characteristics of the manifests to estimate the probability that a trader organized the shipment. Commercial transactions increased over the antebellum period, and on average were responsible for approximately 55 percent of slaves who migrated from Atlantic to Gulf coast ports.

This paper offers a revised series of nineteenth-century Anglo-American foreign exchange rates. The new series is based partly on the reinterpretation of data presented earlier by other scholars and partly on a recently rediscovered source of continuous information on sterling-dollar rates after 1869. The pioneering work in this area was done by Lance Davis and Jonathan Hughes. They published in 1960 a quarterly dollar-sterling exchange rate series (1835 to 1895) based on the actual prices paid for approximately 3,000 sterling bills by Nathan Trotter's Philadelphia-based metals importing firm.

The connection between the spatial pattern of the urban growth spurt of the 1880s and the mortgage market is an aspect of the familiar capital market segmentation hypothesis that has received little attention. Although mortgage lending expanded most rapidly in the smaller western cities during the decade, I conclude that an underlying pattern of segmentation impeded urbanization in these areas at least until 1890. The initial advantage that segmentation conferred on borrowers in the East was reduced to some extent by binding usury ceilings along the Atlantic seaboard.

The rise of serfdom in the sixteenth century undoubtedly has political explanations, but the form that it took has economic explanations. In particular, it took the form of forced labor on enlarged manorial farms. The economic explanation, buttressed with evidence from the period, is that an enserfed labor force must be watched more than free renters and the watching is best done in a manorial framework. The model is stated formally and its implications compared point-by- point with the voluminous evidence for Poland and neighboring regions.