This article reassesses the economic impact of Spanish railroads in 1850–1913, which has usually been considered to be substantially higher than in the most developed countries on the basis of the social saving methodology. The application of growth accounting techniques shows, by contrast, that the direct contribution of railroads to economic growth was lower in Spain than in the United Kingdom, mainly due to the low importance that railroad transport had within Spanish GDP before 1913.

On the basis of new historical research on the Soviet command system we analyze the choices of a plan-setter and an effort-setter who interacted with each other and an external market to determine real output, hidden inflation, and the quality of corruption. We show that the performance of the Soviet economy was affected not only by the level of corruption but also by its quality, that is, how corrupt incomes were used. Our results explain rapid Soviet economic growth despite high corruption levels, and why slower economic growth in the 1970s was accompanied by increased privatization of rents.

The theme of the 2005 annual meetings of the Economic History Association has been War and Economic History: Causes, Costs and Consequences. In this essay I will address this theme by briefly examining the ways in which cliometricians have viewed one particular conflict—The American Civil War—over the past four decades. The first part of my essay deals with the attack, which began at the end of the 1950s, mounted by a group of “New Economic Historians” on the existing explanation of the war; the second part deals with my own adventures as I try to make sense of the economic and political factors that produced the conflict we call the Civil War.

Revisiting an old debate between “traditional” historians and “New” economic historians about the short-run monetary effects of President Jackson's war on the Second Bank, I offer new arguments for the traditionalists. I develop a framework accounting for growth in commercial bank credit based on the “investment club” characteristics of antebellum state-chartered banking and apply it to state bank balance sheet data for 1830–1836. The removal of the Second Bank indeed magnified the boom in commercial banking, and the replacement of Second Bank branches with state-chartered banks as lenders and federal government depositories amplified the boom in frontier lands and state debt.

This article reassesses the importance of colonial status to investors before 1914 by means of multivariable regression analysis of the data available to contemporaries. We show that British colonies were able to borrow in London at significantly lower rates of interest than noncolonies precisely because of their colonial status, which mattered more than either gold standard adherence or the sustainability of fiscal policies. The “empire effect” was, on average, a discount of around 100 basis points, rising to around 175 basis points for the underdeveloped African and Asian colonies. Colonial status significantly reduced the default risk perceived by investors.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, U.S. tobacco manufacturers were not forging ahead of their leading European counterparts in technology, productivity, or managerial techniques. On some indicators, including per capita cigarette consumption, the United States strikingly lagged. Fiscal discrimination against cigarettes, amplified by the monopoly pricing, strategic choices, and organizational overload of the American Tobacco trust, were among the retarding factors.

“Of all things American, nothing is more so than the cigarette.”Written by an enthusiastic booster of the addiction (with the assistance of the American Tobacco Company) in 1916. See Young, Story, p. 4.

When contracting, European merchants could at least partially observe characteristics such as the health, physical strength, and education of indentured servants. These characteristics, unobservable to us, were likely to influence servitude duration, which is observable to us. We employ a switching regression model to analyze 2,066 servitude contracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Servants were positively selected to American mainland colonies in terms of their unobservable human capital and negatively selected to the West Indies. Thus, the relative quality of migrants' human capital may have played a role in the subsequent relative economic performance of these regions.

This article explores the location of industry in pre–World War I Britain using a model that takes account both of factor endowment and also of New Economic Geography influences. Broadly speaking, the pattern of industrial location in this period was quite persistent and regional specialization changed little. The econometric results show that factor endowments had much stronger effects than proximity to markets, although the latter was an attraction for industries with large plant size. Overall, falling transport costs had relatively little effect on industrial location at a time when proximity to natural resources, notably coal, mattered most.

We revisit the evidence on the relations between institutions, the cost of government debt, and financial development in Britain (1690–1790) and find that interest rates remained high and volatile for four decades after the Glorious Revolution, partly due to wars and instability; British interest rates co-moved with those in Holland; Debt per capita remained lower in Britain than in Holland until around 1780; and Britain did not borrow at lower rates than European countries with more limited protection of property rights. We conclude that, in the short run, institutional reforms are not rewarded by financial markets.

This article examines key questions about the development of Pennsylvania's mid-nineteenth-century iron industry. The analysis is based on new data and exhaustive examination of previously underutilized sources within the framework of a geographic information system (GIS). Hypotheses are tested on the timing of adoption of mineral-fuel technologies across the state; the temporal relationships between investment in ironworks, business cycles, and tariff policy; the substitutability of different types and qualities of iron; how transport costs affected iron prices; and the geographical segmentation of iron markets in the antebellum period. The findings reveal complex and dynamic patterns of regional economic development.

Using the 1888 Cost of Living Survey, I estimate the demand for calories of American and British industrial workers. I find that the income and expenditure elasticities of calories for American households are significantly lower than the corresponding elasticities for British households, suggesting that American industrial workers were nutritionally better off than their British counterparts. I further find that the calorie elasticity differential between the two countries was driven by the higher wages enjoyed in the United States. Additional analysis reveals that the relative price of calories was approximately 20 percent greater in Great Britain than in the United States.

Some English country banks were more like modern venture capital firms than modern banks in terms of legal and managerial structure, size and source of investment funding, size and nature of investments, and riskiness. This is exemplified by Praed & Co. of Truro, which was heavily engaged in financing the adoption of a risky new technology—Watt steam engines—by Cornish copper mines in the period 1775–1800. If some banks were proto–venture capital firms, rather than proto-banks, then their illiquid and relatively undiversified investment strategies are more reasonable and their bankruptcies more understandable: high-risk investments sometimes earn negative returns.

This article assesses train speeds in England and Wales 1843–1912. Trains were fast compared with coaches or walking, and the social saving of time saved grew over time to become over 10 percent of national income in 1912. Including fare savings as well, social savings were 14 percent of national income in 1912, with consumer surplus of 6 percent. Time savings dominated fare savings once railways became a new good: travel for the masses. Using the social savings-total factor productivity identity, we show that railways accounted for around a sixth of economy-wide productivity growth in this era.

The completion of the undersea Atlantic telegraph cable more closely integrated securities markets on two continents. This article conducts an event study on the introduction of the Atlantic Cable in July 1866. Using daily data on one security with a dual listing on the New York and London stock exchanges, the event study provides some evidence that the information lag between the two markets shortened from ten days to zero days. Cointegration analysis confirms the result. Historical markets priced securities so well that transatlantic steamship crossing times can be recovered from stock prices.

By the end of the Civil War 186,017 black men had served in the Union Army, roughly three-quarters of whom were former slaves. Because most black soldiers were illiterate farm workers, the war exposed them to a much broader world. Their wartime experience depended upon their peers, their commanding officers, and where their regiment toured and affected their later life outcomes. In the short run the combat units benefited from company homogeneity, which built social capital and minimized shirking, but in the long run men's human capital and acquisition of information was best improved by serving in heterogeneous companies.

The NBER's pre–World War I dating of business cycles implies that the U.S. economy spent nearly every other year in recession. This article extends earlier efforts at redating for the 1796–1914 period using a single metric: Davis's (2004) annual industrial production index. The new chronology alters more than 40 percent of the peak and troughs and removes the most questionable cycles. An important implication of this is the lack of discernible differences in the frequency and duration of industrial cycles among the pre–Civil War, Civil War to World War I, and post–World War II periods.

A substantial literature exists claiming the adoption of tractors was inefficiently slow. We develop a linear programming model of farms that specifically incorporates the opportunity cost of the farmer's time and apply it to farms in Iowa during the interwar period. We develop technological coefficients derived at the task level, based on the data and agricultural reports from that period. By valuing the time saved by tractors, we demonstrate that the seemingly slow rate of tractor adoption was in fact wealth maximizing. Tractors were widely adopted only after the improvement in implements that came late in this period.

The writing and allocation of French tax farm contracts changed dramatically after the Fronde (1648–1653): they were gradually transformed from small, competitively auctioned, units into a large cartel known as the Company of General Farms. Surprisingly, the crown's revenues increased. I present a transaction cost argument to explain the behavior of tax farm lease prices as tax farming changed during the seventeenth century. Cartelization of tax farms lowered costs faced by the crown. The tax farm system's evolution offers insights into how organizations evolve to protect their property rights in the absence of well functioning representative institutions.

We estimate a threshold autoregressive model to assess medieval financial integration. Our approach is based on the analysis of deviations between exchange rates and parity, which in a fully integrated market should not exceed bullion points. Hence, the time needed for adjustment, following a violation of the bullion points, is a measure of integration. We apply this approach to exchange between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders, Lübeck, and Prussia, results showing that whereas it took about eight months to reduce deviations between Flanders and Lübeck by 50 percent, those between Flanders and Prussia were roughly twice as persistent.

We examine the politics of the “Salary Grab” of 1873, legislation that increased congressional salaries retroactively by 50 percent. A group of New England and Midwestern elites opposed the Salary Grab, along with congressional franking and patronage-based civil service appointments, as part of a reform effort to reshape “who should govern Congress.” Our analyses of congressional voting confirm the existence of this nonparty elite coalition. Although these elites lost many legislative battles in the short run, their efforts kept reform on the legislative agenda throughout the late nineteenth century and ultimately set the stage for the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century.