Construction of the first transcontinental railroad, financed with large federal subsidies, is an important event in American history. Were the subsidies necessary to induce private investment in the railroad? The ex-ante investment decision examined uses contemporary reports and a simulation model to show that investors expected the railroad to be profitable. Evidence also shows that the railroad created political conflicts in Congress between the North and South. The secession removed the South as a disputant in Congress, reducing short-term political conflict but not long-term conflict. Subsidies reduced political risk, rather than transport market failure, and encouraged private investment.

The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy’s postwar economic development. It exploits differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could modernize their infrastructure more quickly experienced higher increases in agricultural production, especially for perishable crops. In the same provinces, we observe larger investments in labor-saving machines, the entry of more firms into the industrial sector, and a larger expansion of the industrial and service workforces.

Measurement of the value of “media capture” (the control of newspapers by business or political interests) is difficult. However, if capture is valuable, it should affect the price of newspaper shares. Useful information about the value of media capture should be retrievable from Stock Exchange data. Interwar France provides a unique setting to implement this idea because key newspapers floated voting and nonvoting stocks. Combined with takeover prices, data yield estimates of the price of media capture and of the time-series evolution of this price. Comparison with Britain sheds new light on a dark episode of French history.

The Tsarist government played an important and fateful role in the development of the relationship between workers and employers in the early stages of Russian industrialization. Although the general character of this role is well known to historians, further study and reexamination of Tsarist labor policy, in the light of the contemporary concern with economic development, is invited by the Soviet publication in recent years of documentary evidence on nineteenth century labor problems. An attempt will be made in this article to integrate some of the new evidence with data from earlier sources in an analysis of the methods used by the Tsarist government to cope with the problem posed by internal government of industry in an era of growing labor unrest. It will focus on the period between the Emancipation and the 1905 Revolution. Russia did not become an industrial state during this period, but industry made enough progress to bring the country face to face with the modern labor problem. It was a period in which social and economic relations, rooted in feudal traditions, began to undergo significant changes in response to industrial growth. Labor unrest and protest are one of the chief symptoms of the problems inherent in this socio-economic readjustment. To understand the Tsarist approach to these problems it will be necessary to begin with a brief outline of the social milieu of Russian industrialization and of the governmental attitude toward industrial discipline and unrest before the Emancipation. The second section of the article covers the period between the Emancipation and the mideighties, during which the government did not formally regulate the internal order of the factory but was not unconcerned with the relations between employers and workers. The third section covers the period after 1886, when the internal factory order was subject to formal regulation and official inspection.

Unfortunately, what follows does not answer the title question—although I conclude that the preponderance of current evidence answers yes, that economic burden did spark the Revolution. Rather, what follows elaborates the ingredients required for a definitive answer and, as a by-product, illuminates why the historical treatment of the origins of the American Revolution remains a muddle.

In recent work, W. W. Rostow and W. A. Lewis have forcefully argued that real, not monetary, forces explain major periods of inflation and deflation in both the United States and Great Britain from 1797 to 1914. For them, changes in relative growth rates of agricultural and industrial output induce changes in the relative prices of major commodities and in the overall price level. A test of the substitutability of wheat for other primary products, 1870–1914, does not support the Rostow-Lewis theory.

The traditional economic history of the 1920's emphasizes the importance of changes in the structure of the American economy. It is argued that three structural changes—monopoly power, technical change, and income distribution—tainted the prosperity of the twenties. The main features of this explanation are easily summarized. Rapid advances in technology reduced the costs of producing output. At the same time corporate monopoly power was increasing thereby restricting the tendency for output prices to fall. In the presence of weak labor unions, the interaction of technical change and monopoly power had the result of increasing “profits” relative to “wages.” The shift in the distribution of income not only favored owners of capital but it also created an imbalance between investment and consumption. Consumption expenditures could not keep pace with investment expenditures and this tendency towards underconsumption, in turn, was one reason for the onset of the Great Depression.

Recent work by Reid, Higgs, Sutch and Ransom and others is an indication that increasing scholarly attention is being addressed to the post-bellum southern economy. The object of this note is to raise a word of caution with respect to work done on the South in which the latter is taken to mean a more or less homogeneous section of the nation. In particular I would suggest that (a) substantial and important variations exist within this region, differences which may even be obscured when the South is divided along the usual Bureau of the Census sub-regional borders, and (b) a disaggregation of the South into more functional units than that of the Census Bureau may provide insights into the relative poverty experienced in the region, particularly of the black population in this area in the years before 1910.

This study analyzes the demographic characteristics of a previously neglected area in colonial America—the urban center. Growth, birth, and death rates in Philadelphia between 1720 and 1775 are estimated using a variety of sources. Immigration, smallpox, economic vacillations, and a skewed age structure are attributed primary responsibility in determining the level of and changes in Philadelphia's vital rates. The elevated level of these rates is evident in a comparison with vital rates in Andover and Boston, Massachusetts, and Nottingham, England.

It is widely believed that one of the main causes of productivity decline in British coalmining in the late nineteenth century was that when wage rates increased, miners responded by reducing work effort and/or attendance. However, previous empirical studies have conflated behavioral responses with correlations between coal-seam quality and wage rates. Using individual panel data from a single mine, I show that the short-run wage elasticity of worker effort was in fact positive. The true elasticity of attendance is less clear, but there is no support for the idea that absenteeism increased when wage rates rose.

My dissertation uses historical records and a context-specific mechanism-design model to investigate the institutional and contractual arrangements that enhanced mobilization of capital and risk-sharing in late-medieval Venice.This disssertation was written at the Department of Economics at the European University Institute under the supervision of Professors Avner Greif and Ramon Marimon with support from the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University. I also wish to thank Andrea Drago, Gavin Wright, Jaime Reis, and Leandro Prados de la Escosura for their help in various ways. The funding of long-distance risky trade in late medieval Venice could potentially promote economic prosperity, but it required that merchants were able to commit ex-ante not to breach their financial contracts ex-post. Institutions for contract enforcement were thus required to mitigate this commitment problem and enable welfare-enhancing financial exchange.Institutions are constraints that enable merchants to commit. For a definition of institutions, see Greif, Historical Institutional Analysis; and North, Institutions. Distinct institutional arrangements enforce different sets of contractual forms, among which particular ones can be chosen. The selection of various contracts, and their underlying institutional foundations, has significant efficiency effects. The dissertation thus integrates a historical institutional analysis of the emergence and transition of various contracts with the study of their efficiency attributes. This approach enables me to address the following questions: What institutions for contract enforcement enabled the Venetians to commit to the sea loan (a debt-like contract) and the commenda (an equity-like contract)? What caused the transition from the former to the latter? Did the Venetians attain an optimal allocation of risk?

The Soviet dictatorship used secrecy to shield its processes from external scrutiny. A system of accounting for classified documentation assured the protection of secrets. The associated procedures resemble a turnover tax applied to government transactions. There is evidence of both compliance and evasion. The burden of secrecy was multiplied because the system was also secret and so had to account for itself. Unique documentation of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, is exploited to yield an estimate of the burden. Measured against available benchmarks, the burden looks surprisingly heavy.

The countries of non-Russian “Communist Eastern Europe” present the economic historian with a fascinating field for study. This opportunity has, judging from English-language journals at least, largely gone unexploited. Moreover, although Eastern Europe remained a predominantly agrarian region up to the most recent times, the existing literature concentrates heavily on finance, trade, and industry. It is in the hope of contributing to the discussion of Eastern European economic history, most particularly some of its agricultural aspects, that this article has been written.

This article investigates how, with increasing land pressure during Russian settlement in Kazakh steppes in the late nineteenth century, clan institutions affected the transition from nomadic pastoralism to settled agriculture. Using a novel dataset constructed from Russian colonial expedition materials matched with clan genealogies, we find that, controlling for geographic factors, clan identity strongly influenced the duration of transhumance period, the organization of production, and the acquisition of new agricultural tools. Information transmission within clans, external economies of scale in nomadic pastoralism, and clan-specific values and norms underlie the results.

After joining the industrial workforce during World War II, women disappeared from industrial employment with postwar reconversion. This article uses data from Ford Motor Company employee records to describe female industrial workers, their work histories before Ford, and their exit patterns from Ford. We draw a more complete picture of these industrial workers and discuss the differences between those who chose to leave Ford and those who left involuntarily. Contrary to popular myth it was housewives, along with African-American and older women, those with the fewest outside opportunities, who were more likely to be laid-off.