The debate over the health and nutrition of slaves has focused on the typical working adult. Height and mortality data, however, indicate that the greatest systemativ variation in health and nutrition occured by age. Nourishment was exceedingly poor for slave childrenm but workers were remarkably well fed. The unusayal growth-by-age profile for slaves has implications for views on the postwar economic fortunes of blacks, the interpretation of findings of other height studies, and conceptions of slaveowner decision making, the slave family, and the slave personality.

A widely entertained hypothesis holds that, in comparisons among countries, productivity growth rates tend to vary inversely with productivity levels. A century of experience in a group of presently industrialized countries supports this hypothesis and the convergence of productivity levels it implies. The rate of convergence, however, varied from period to period and showed marked strength only during the first quarter-century following World War II. The general process of convergence was also accompanied by dramatic shifts in countries' productivity rankings. The paper extends the simple catch-up hypothesis to rationalize the fluctuating strength of the process and explores the connections between convergence itself and the relative success of early leaders and latecomers.

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.

The paper examines the economic role played by poor relief in early nineteenth-century England. A three-equation model is estimated to explain cross-parish variations in per capita relief expenditures, agricultural laborers' annual wage income, and unemployment rates. Relief expenditures are found to be related to crop mix, the political power of labor-hiring farmers, distance from London, and employment opportunities in cottage industry. The results strongly support the revisionist analysis of the Old Poor Law, and reject the analysis contained in the Report of the Royal Poor Law Commission.

The development of new machinery in nineteenth-century American canning followed two paths. Automative, labor-saving devices were developed to replace labor in unskilled tasks while deskilling, human-capital-saving machinery was designed to make craft labor more replaceable. Cannery operators appear to have focused on deskilling machinery as the key to greater managerial control over production. Craft workers through organizational power and pressing for higher wages seem to have stimulated the early and sustained search for deskilling machinery. Because human-capital-saving machinery allowed wage cuts, they could be adopted prior to their being used as labor-saving devices.

Unlike most studies of uneven development before World War I, this paper uses the region (not the nation) as the unit of study. Weak market links with the national market partially explain persisting relative backwardness in the Habsburg Empire's eastern hinterland and in the American South. Even if product and factor markets had been perfectly integrated, institutional rigidities would have greatly retarded development. In the Empire, growth emerged in the west where serfdom was weakening and spread slowly as feudal institutions decayed. In America, capitalistic institutions promoted development in the North more thoroughly than did slavery and postbellum institutions in the South.

The evolution from indentured to redemptioner servitude as a means of financing immigration to late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania is documented. The compensating differences between methods are used to explain contract choice. The rate of return to shipping redemptioners is estimated and compared with the default rate needed to make it a competitive return. The expected incidence of defaults and the implications for risk pooling among families and risk spreading across voyages are investigated.

Although coal companies may have tried to exploit a local-store monopoly, company-store prices in nonunion areas were appreciably limited by competition from other stores and mines in the same labor market. Company stores persisted in part by lowering transactions costs. Prices at company stores were generally similar to those at nearby independent stores, and higher wages may have compensated for higher store prices at isolated mines. Conditions varied, however, with labor-market tightness. Miners were generally not in debt to the store, nor paid entirely in scrip. Scrip was an advance on payday, when miners received cash.

Biased technical change, scale economies, and factor substitution were part of U.S. manufacturing's technical response to factor price movements during the period 1850 to 1919. In this article we employ the cost dual of a Generalized Leontief production function to test directly for the presence of these three effects for nineteen two-digit manufacturing sectors. Biased technical change is found in all but one sector; scale economies in all but two; factor substitutability, in all but five. Estimates of scale and bias effects for labor, capital, and materials are presented by sector, and the results are compared with other recent work.

The loss to the English economy caused by decreased migration resulting from relief payments to agricultural laborers is estimated. I conclude that, at worst, the Poor Law had a small negative impact on national product. If poor relief and wages were substitutes, the Poor Law may have had a positive impact on capital formation and economic growth.

Municipal involvement in the finance of fine arts museums raises the question: Just which market failure serves to rationalize this public subsidy? Two contenders are prominent in the literature: decreasing costs and education externalities. The relationship of price to marginal cost provides an operational test to distinguish among the two rationales. Scattered data from the 1880s and 1890s as well as contemporary discussion indicate that, implausible as it may seem now, education externalities constituted the operational justification for the public subsidy.

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.

Estimates of interstate migration after 1815 and before 1860 for white, U.S.-born adults are presented. The estimates come from a sample of military bounty land warrant recipients who served in the War of 1812 and show that a majority of veterans spent their adult lives in the same state. The limited amount of interstate movement did conform to traditional descriptions of an east-west pattern. I also consider the social basis for interstate migration.

Inflation in Germany from 1919 to 1923 resulted from the accumulation and the anticipation of government deficits. Inflationary expectations depended therefore on fiscal news. Allied demands for reparations, the occupation of the Ruhr, and domestic revolts were important negative news and led to increased inflation. Tax reforms and eventually the end to government deficits were important positive news and ushered in periods of price stability. Political events were fiscal news as they changed the chances for the government to balance the budget.

Most historical studies of immigration in nineteenth-century America have failed to distinguish among the labor-market experiences of different immigrant groups. Using a sample of some 4000 wage earners from turn-of-the-century Iowa, we examine the relative earnings of skilled and unskilled immigrants and suggest the factors which contributed to their very different post-immigration experiences. The results indicate that prior knowledge of a trade conferred upon immigrants an initial earnings advantage, but that unskilled immigrants managed subsequently to close some but not all of the gap by reaping greater returns to experience on the job.

The Greek hyperinflation started during the Axis occupation and was the result of an excessive reliance by the puppet government on the inflation tax. The inflation reached a peak in November 1944 after liberation. The Greek government undertook three stabilization efforts spread over eighteen months before price level stability was achieved. The final effort involved fiscal reform and the creation of an independent supracentral bank. Controversy surrounds the origin and nature of the transition costs involved in stabilizing an economy. The Greek stabilization cannot resolve all the issues raised.

This paper compares two financial institutions that provided the same functions at the same time, but in different countries and with different memberships. Though the London and New York stock exchanges appear to be alike between 1850 and 1914, they were not, as each responded in its own way to the forces acting upon it. The result was a radically different organization of the securities market in Britain and the United States. This had important implications for the money and capital markets and consequences for business and the economy.