Since the triumph of a business culture a century and half ago the businessman has been scorned, and so the phrase “bourgeois virtue” sounds like an oxymoron. Economists since Bentham have believed that anyway virtue is beside the point: what matters for explanation is Prudence. But this is false in many circumstances, even strictly economic circumstances. An economic history that insists on Prudence Alone is misspecified, and will produce biased coefficients. And it will not face candidly the central task of economic history, an apology for or a criticism of a bourgeois society.

Research on nineteenth-century economic and social mobility has concentrated on occupational change among men who remained in the same community for ten or more years, although fewer than half of any community's residents persist that long. This article uses a data set created specifically to compare the experiences of men who migrated from Newburyport, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century with those of men who persisted. It finds that blue-collar migrants were more successful than were their counterparts who did not move. The results suggest that previous studies may have considerably underestimated the extent of economic opportunity in nineteenth-century America.

New estimates of nominal earnings and the cost of living are presented and used to make a fresh assessment of changes in the real earnings of male and female manual workers in Britain from 1770 to 1870. Workers' average real earnings are then adjusted for factors such as unemployment, the number of their dependants, and the costs of urbanization. The main finding is that the standard of living of the average working-class family improved by less than 15 percent between the 1780s and 1850s. This long plateau is shown to be consistent with other economic, political, and demographic indicators.

From the 1930s to the 1980s, economic policies in Latin America epitomized the inward-looking model of development. The model emerged in the Depression, and was later codified in unorthodox economic theories. Even though economic performance was seen as disappointing by the 1960s, the distortions persisted and worsened into the 1970s and 1980s. This article examines the costs of distortions and explores the structural differences between growth dynamics in Latin America and elsewhere. Distortions had profound effects on many aspects of the growth process, help explain divergent development, and raise important questions about economic growth and the evolution of institutions.

Chain migration was an important factor in European migrants' decisions in the nineteenth century. This article demonstrates that previous migrations have long-run effects and continue to impact the decisions of future migrants for many years. Chain migration produces not only more migration but different migrants. Migrants from over 1,300 different German villages are classified as networked and non-networked. The most definitive results from comparing the two types of migrants are the figures on cash assets because they support the model's prediction that socially networked migrants needed less cash than non-networked migrants to accomplish their migration goals.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centureis, the regions of the United States went from a set of relatively isolated regional economies to an integrated national economy. Economic integration, as we as long-run secular changes in the economic structure associated with economic growth, played an important role in determining U.S. regional industrial structures. Moreover, although differences in regional industrial structures do not explain all the variations in regional income per capita, they played an important role in causing U.S. regional incomes to diverge and converge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In this article we use a unique source—a 30-year time series of the share transactions of two joint-stock companies—to examine the growth of the London capital market prior to and immediately after the Glorious Revolution. We argue that the London experience with open capital markets was not solely the result of 1689. Rather it was the learning by private individuals and goldsmith bankers which took place in the decades before 1689 that allowed the market to take full advantage of the property rights changes which occurred with the change in regimes.

Witnesses' accounts are used to analyze changes in working hours between 1750 and 1800. Two findings stand out. The article demonstrates that the information contained in witnesses' accounts allows us to reconstruct historical time-budgets and provides extensive tests of the new method. Estimates of annual labor input in 1749/63 and 1799/1803 are presented. It emerges that the number of annual working hours changed rapidly between the middle and the of the eighteenth century. These findings have important implications for the issue of total factor productivity during the Industrial Revolution.

Secondary-school enrollment and graduation rates increased spectacularly in much of the United States from 1910 to 1940; the advance was particularly rapid from 1920 to 1935 in the nonsouthern states. This increase was uniquely American; no other nation underwent an equivalent change for several decades. States that rapidly expanded their high school enrollments early in the period had greater wealth, more homogeneity of wealth, and less manufacturing activity than others. Factors prompting the expansion include the substantial returns to education early in the century and a responsive “state.” This work is based on a newly constructed state-level data set.

This article argues that medieval craft guilds emerged in order to provide transferable skills through apprenticeship. They prospered for more than half a millennium because they sustained interregional specialized labor markets and contributed to technological invention by stimulating technical diffusion through migrant labor and by providing inventors with temporary monopoly rents. They played a leading role in preindustrial manufacture because their main competitor, rural putting out, was a net consumer rather than producer of technological innovation. They finally disappeared not through adaptive failure but because national states abolished them by decree.

After the Civil War, Congress maintained high import tariffs to pay off the public debt. By the early 1880s the federal government was running large fiscal surpluses –revenues exceeded expenditures by over 40 percent. The Democrats proposed lower tariffs to reduce customs revenue. The Republicans proposed higher tariffs to reduce imports and customs revenues. This article attempts to determine the revenue effects of the proposed changes. Given the height of the tariff and the price elasticity of U.S. import demand, the actual tariff was below the maximum revenue rate, and therefore a tariff reduction would have reduced customs revenue.

Socioeconomic differences in birth weight have narrowed since 1900. The mother's nutritional status during her growing years, proxied by height, accounted for most of the differences in the past, but not today. Children born at the beginning of this century compared favorably to modem populations in terms of birth weights, but suffered high fetal and neonatal death rates. By day ten children in the past were at a disadvantage because best practice resulted in insufficient feeding. Improved obstetrical, medical, and nutritional knowledge has increased weight in the first days of life, which may account for increased adult stature.

This article examines one feature of the pre—Federal Reserve financial system that has not been widely researched: the market for bank drafts (the “domestic exchanges”). Though the exchanges existed for nearly a century, critics argued that exchange rate fluctuations exacerbated financial panics. We find, using cointegration analysis over the period from 1899 to 1908, that differences in growth rates across regions caused predictable movements in rates. We conclude that the exchanges promoted efficiency in the payments system. This supports the view that the private sector might have developed a unified national system had the Fed not abolished the exchanges.

This article describes the institutional transition from a centrally managed interregional payments system to an unmanaged, decentralized one after President Andrew Jackson's veto of the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States, and evaluates the effect on the level and variability of exchange rates. Comparison of the reduction in specie points, driven by falling transportation and insurance costs, with the reduction in exchange rates in two Ohio cities over the period from 1830 to 1859 lends support to the article's conclusion that decentralization was one cause of higher and more volatile inland exchange rates.

A sectoral analysis of comparative labor productivity levels over the period 1870 to 1990 suggests mechanisms of catching-up and forging ahead that are rather different from those found in the conventional literature. Both Germany and the United States caught up with and overtook Britain in terms of aggregate labor productivity largely by shifting resources out of agriculture and improving their relative productivity position in services rather than by improving their position in manufacturing. Although capital played some role, the changes in comparative labor productivity also reflected changes in comparative total factor productivity, related to technology and organization.

Common property rights were widespread in English agriculture for at least 600 years. Since privatizing common fields allegedly produced huge profits in the eighteenth century, common land owners seemingly squandered 15 percent of potential income for generations. Ingenious explanations have been produced for this market failure. This article argues for a simple, brutal resolution. Common fields survived because enclosure was generally unprofitable before 1750, when changing relative prices made private property rights marginally more efficient. Then people responded quickly to modest profits. The rich gains from enclosure existed only in the imaginings of wild-eyed eighteenth century agrarian reformers.

The Lower South remained a financial outlier in postbellum America, partly because it lacked developed metropolises. As focal points of regional economic networks, metropolises spawn externalities necessary for financial intermediaries. This cumulative process was constrained in the Lower South by the plantation system and staple monoculture. Only after 1880 did metropolitan networks form around new wholesale distribution centers, notably Atlanta and Dallas. Unlike coastal ports, these cities mediated more diverse commercial and financial transactions and attracted more correspondent banks. Consequently, Atlanta and Dallas were the most likely Federal Reserve cities in their districts, a view shared by local banks.

Black families included in the 1918/19 BLS Consumer Purchases Survey used installment credit more frequently and merchant credit less frequently than White families. Economic and demographic characteristics explain the racial difference for installment but not for merchant credit. I argue greater demand for installment credit by Black families was satisfied because repossession of collateral upon buyer default overcame merchants' personal prejudice with regard to creditworthiness, but absence of tangible collateral impacted the availability of merchant credit. Low use of merchant credit can account for relatively high interwar saving rates for low-income Black families.

The articles by Harrison and Allen that follow deal with a major episode in economic history, one that offers both rich empirical evidence and challenging theoretic problems. It is now possible to conduct an economic post mortem on seven turbulent decades in the experience of the very large economy that made up the Soviet Union, and these articles examine some key operational issues lying at the heart of that experience. Readers will find the best introduction to these issues in Paul Gregory's masterly monograph, Before Command. My task here is limited to identifying the context for the intellectual action on the stage.

Japan vigorously enforced wide-ranging developmental policies in colonial Korea, including a “green revolution” and an industrialization drive. Why did then colonial per capita food availability decline? Simulations using a dynamic general equilibrium model indicate that tax raises, which financed expanding public investment, did not lower, but raised consumption levels over time by accelerating accumulation. Food consumption fell because these policy efforts were inadequate to defeat population explosion initiated by a health campaign. The interwar agricultural depression exacerbated this Malthusian situation. Nevertheless, interwar Korean consumption trend compares favorably with most other rice producers, where the level of government intervention appeared suboptimal.