This article assesses how the government of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) negotiated sovereign loans. Mexico was a serial defaulter that established a good reputation and issued bonds abroad at progressively better conditions. Based on new archival material, the article demonstrates that borrowing terms improved not only because of sounder fundamentals, but also due to the efforts of high officials to negotiate with debt underwriters. The Mexicans never accepted a patron bank and used the offers from American banks to bargain with European competitors. They acted according to the government's reputation, the underwriters' status, and the ideology of the Porfirian state.

In order to examine the relation between exports and inequality, this article first estimates per-capita income, exports, and other indicators of economic development in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Manuscript data are analyzed to measure and interpret three kinds of inequality: of income, of total wealth, and of landholding. The results suggest that exports and foreign ownership contributed far less to inequality than is imagined in dependency theory.

Previous studies of the political business cycle have examined time series data to determine whether a pattern of pre-election boom and post-election slump exists. The studies do not investigate the behavior and mechanisms by which a politician may effectuate a political business cycle. We focus on one time period, 1969 to 1972, and conclude that President Nixon's personality and operating environment explain why he manipulated the economy for political gain. The mechanisms he utilized to improve macroeconomic conditions before the 1972 election include monetary policy, fiscal policy, and wage-price controls.

Recent interest in promoting the economic development of the so-called “underdeveloped” areas has stimulated concern with the problem of the effects of social anil cultural institutions on economic growth. A major difficulty in the study of this problem is the scarcity of cases of marked economic development in non-Western cultural milieus, Japan being the major striking exception. Under these circumstances it may be of some interest to examine cases of less striking change on a smaller scale, not only for what can be learned about each case, but also for the assistance they may give in interpreting the more numerous cases of little or no economic growth.

As economic historians delve more deeply into the economy of the Continental Colonies, they become increasingly aware of its sophistication. Good Englishmen in every way, the colonists' economic development closely paralleled that of a Mother Country which, of course, by the 1770's, was on the eve of an industrial revolution. The British themselves constantly complained of colonial competition in most every sphere of activity. Yet any claims for a highly developed colonial economy by historians, or complaints about competition by British merchants, have, until recently, sounded more like puffery or self-pity. Facts have been few. Even so major an element in the process of economic growth as the accumulation and productive mobilization of colonial domestic savings remains to be examined. It is now possible to say something about at least this topic for a significant colonial enterprise, the shipping industry.

In studying the history of capitalism, one rarely encounters business enterprises without a capital stock or a profit account, founded and managed by men who expressed no desire for monetary rewards, and lacking owner-entrepreneurs. This paper deals with just such institutions—mutual savings banks. It has been recognized for some time that during the antebellum period mutual savings banks were relatively large and influential institutions. In 1860, when mutuals held a total of $150,000,000 in assets, the next most important type of non-bank financial intermediary, life insurance companies, held assets of only $24,000,000. More impressive was the size of some of the individual mutuals, for in 1860 several mutuals ranked among the ten largest business organizations in the country. Throughout most of the antebellum period the nation's largest mutual was the Bank for Savings in the City of New York. In 1825 this one bank held 56 percent of the nation's savings bank deposits; and ten years later, in 1835, it still accounted for over 34 percent of the country's deposits and 42 percent of its customers. Another New York institution—the Bowery Savings Bank—surpassed the Bank for Savings as the nation's largest mutual in 1860. At that time each of these banks commanded deposits in excess of $10,000,000 and a third New York mutual, the Seamen's Bank for Savings, was approaching that mark. In all, nineteen mutual savings banks were founded in New York City between 1819 and 1860. Table 1 shows the date that each bank opened for business, and the amount on deposit on January 1, 1861.

Only in recent years have the economic problems involved in the conduct of war begun to receive much attention from scholars. As a result of sad experience we now also have substantial groups engaged in studying the problems of postwar readjustment, but I know of no attempt to present a summary generalization of the more enduring reactions of American wars upon the economic life of the country. By the more enduring reactions I mean those which are felt after the postwar period of readjustment and which may be due either directly to the war or to the depression caused by the war.

During 1850–1913 the growth of the world economy was not steady. The observed variations are described with the phrase “G-waves.” In contrast to Kondratieff long waves, G-waves lack a regular periodicity and amplitude.

Evidence drawn from records of auctions held by the Royal African Company in Barbados between 1673 and 1723 is used to obtain annual estimates of slave prices by demographic category. These price series are then used to investigate the implications of an economic analysis of the demographic composition of the slave trade. The results provide quantitative support for the prediction that rising slave prices in the West Indies caused an increase in the share of children among the population of slaves in the transatlantic trade. This economic effect may have been a significant link between American slave markets and the demographic history of black populations in both Africa and America.

The political and economic institutions of the Dutch Republic puzzle the historian. Closely juxtaposed are elements suggesting a tantalizing precociousness and elements which hearken to the medieval past. The Republic was the creation of a revolution; it can be identified as the first European state to throw off a monarchical regime and bring a bourgeois social class to full political power. On the other hand, the foremost motive behind this rebellion was the resistance of medieval, municipal particularism to governmental centralization—to modernization, if you will.

The Chesapeake economy failed to grow during the first half of the eighteenth century, but experienced rapid development during the third quarter of the century. Economic stagnation before 1750 resulted from the inability of tobacco planters either to increase productivity or to reduce costs of production, whereas an increase in grain exports and rising amounts of Scottish credit to planters explain growth during the pre-Revolutionary decades. Nonetheless, whites were able to purchase increasing quantities of consumer goods by exploiting the labor of the increasing numbers of black slaves who produced most of the region's tobacco.

This article examines economic policy in the Eisenhower years and the president's role in the 1960 election. I measure the impact of changes in fiscal policy on real GNP and show that policy in 1959 was unusually contractionary and cannot be dismissed as merely evidence of Eisenhower's fiscal conservatism.

Covered mortgage bonds have been used successfully in Europe for two centuries, but failed in the United States when introduced as farm mortgage debentures in the 1880s. Using firm-level data and a sample of loans made by one Kansas mortgage company, I find that debenture programs grew out of established loan brokerage operations and were used to fund mortgages that were difficult to broker because of size, term, or risk characteristics. Debentures broadened access to the interregional mortgage market and facilitated an expansion of western farm mortgage debt before the innovation failed in the mortgage crisis of the 1890s.

“[T]he availability of affordable mortgage financing is essential to turning the corner on the current housing crisis …. One option we have looked at extensively is covered bonds, which … have the potential to increase mortgage financing, improve underwriting standards, and strengthen U.S. financial institutions ….”

Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson

July 28, 2008

Will technical change spur conflicts in the labor market? In this study, we examine electricity adoption in Sweden during the first decades of the twentieth century. Exploiting that proximity to hydropowered plants shaped the electricity network independently of previous local conditions, we estimate the impact of electricity on labor strikes. Our results indicate that electricity adoption preceded an increase in conflicts, but strikes were of an offensive nature and most common in sectors with increasing labor demand. This suggests that electrification provided workers with a stronger bargaining position from which they could voice their claims.

This article contributes to the debate on the causes of unemployment in interwar Germany. It applies the Layard-Nickell model of the labor market to interwar data. The results indicate that demand shocks, combined with nominal inertia in the labor market, were important in explaining unemployment. Real wage pressures due to procedures for wage determination were a major influence on unemployment, but were partly offset by movements in other supply-side variables, such as the replacement ratio and the pricing policy of cartels. Demand- and supply-side variables were mutually reinforcing in the Great Depression and in the recovery under the Nazis.

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where Black officeholders were attacked have the largest tax reversions. This provides the first quantitative evidence that Reconstruction political violence was specifically related to Black political efficacy.

The Classical Gold Standard period, with high capital mobility and fixed-exchange rates, is usually seen as the extreme case of international constraints on monetary policy. Contrary to this view, we show how central bank balance sheets offset the effects of international shocks on domestic interest rates. In contrast, in the United States, a gold standard country without a central bank, the reaction of money market rates was two to four times stronger than that of interest rates in countries with a central bank. Our study is based on the monthly balance sheets of all central banks in the world (i.e., 21) from 1891–1913.