The causes of the United States’ exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India. American industrialization in the nineteenth century required tariff protection since the country's comparative advantage lay in agriculture. After 1895 surging American productivity shifted the country's comparative advantage to manufacturing. Egypt and India could not have industrialized by following American policies since their wages were so low and their energy costs so high that the modern technology that was cost effective in Britain and the United States would not have paid in their circumstances.

Studies have shown a connection between finance and growth, but most do not consider how financial and real factors interact to put a virtuous cycle of economic development into motion. As the main transportation advance of the nineteenth century, railroads connected established commercial centers and made unsettled areas along their routes better candidates for development. We measure the strength of links between railroads and banks in seven Midwest states using an annual transportation geographic information system (GIS) database linked to a census of banking. These data indicate that those counties that already had a bank were more likely to see their first railroad go through over the next decade, while new banks tended to enter a county a year or two after a railroad was built. The initial banking system thus helped establish the rail system, while the rapid expansion of railroads helped fill in the banking map of the American Midwest.

This article scrutinizes the recently postulated link between the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and economic success. Multivariate analysis of 4,705 demographic observations, covering women's marriage age, female lifetime celibacy, and household complexity in 39 European countries, shows that the most extreme manifestations of the EMP were associated with economic stagnation rather than growth. There is no evidence that the EMP improved economic performance by empowering women, increasing human capital investment, adjusting population to economic trends, or sustaining beneficial cultural norms. European economic success was not caused by the EMP and its sources must therefore be sought in other factors.

Was colonization costly for France? Did French taxpayers contribute to colonies’ development? This article reveals that French West Africa's colonization took only 0.29 percent of French annual expenditures, including 0.24 percent for military and central administration and 0.05 percent for French West Africa's development. For West Africans, the contribution from French taxpayers was almost negligible: mainland France provided about 2 percent of French West Africa's revenue. In fact, colonization was a considerable burden for African taxpayers since French civil servants’ salaries absorbed a disproportionate share of local expenditures.

The partition of German Togoland after World War I provides a natural experiment to test the impact of British and French colonization. Using data of recruits to the Ghanaian colonial army 1908–1955, we find that literacy and religious affiliation diverge at the border between the parts of Togoland under British and French control as early as in the 1920s. We partly attribute this to policies towards missionary schools. The divergence is only visible in the South where educational and evangelization efforts were strong. Contemporary survey data show that border effects that began in colonial times still persist today.

Hollywood converted to sound in three years. In comparison, Hollywood's conversion to color required more than three decades, and included a three-year period in which the share of color movies declined from 58 to 31percent. We investigate this puzzling adoption profile using detailed data on 7,022 movies between 1940 and 1959. These data indicate differences in studio size and complementarity between genre and color impeded the rapid diffusion of color. These data also indicate that disadoption followed weak returns to a wave of color releases that were encouraged by the introductionof a low-cost color process.

This article presents a quantitative analysis of the geographic distribution of spending through the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA). Using newly assembled state- and county-level data, the results show that the Johnson administration directed funding in ways consistent with the War on Poverty's rhetoric of fighting poverty and racial discrimination: poorer areas and those with a greater share of nonwhite residents received systematically more funding. In contrast to New Deal spending, political variables explain very little of the variation in EOA funding. The smaller role of politics may help explain the strong backlash against the War on Poverty's programs.

The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the Ostrom (2007, 2009) framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide the construction of a model of this transition. An increase in the resource price leads the owner to prefer communal harvesting, which simplifies monitoring against theft. I support this framework with evidence from colonial court records. “Palm cutting always cause palaver.”

We estimate the self-selection of Mexican migrants into and out of the United States in the 1920s. Officials recorded migrant height on border crossing manifests, which we use to proxy migrant quality and to measure self-selection into migration in 1920. Migrants were positively selected on height compared to the Mexican population. We link these migrants to the 1930 U.S. and Mexican censuses to obtain samples of permanent and return migrants and to estimate the selection into return migration. Return migrants were not differentially self-selected on height relative to permanent migrants.

I study the impacts of one of the largest regional development projects in American History, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), on a variety of economic outcomes. The TVA has been noted as an example of how to develop a region's water power potential to stimulate growth. In what follows, I show using a county-level panel dataset, that the TVA had little impact on economic growth in the South. I attribute these results to the institutional history of the TVA and the contractual agreements it signed in an effort to expand its service territory.

“…as a pebble dropped in a pond causes ripples to flow outward to the surrounding shores, the influence of TVA'slow rates flows outward to surrounding areas…”

TVA's Influence on Electric Rates 1965

We study the initial expansion of public schooling across Brazilian states (1889–1930) and develop an alternative explanation of how colonial institutions may affect the provision of public goods in the long run. We find that states that exported commodities undergoing international booms, between 1889 and 1930, had significantly larger export tax revenues and could spend more on education, while other states lagged behind. Yet, such positive effect of commodity booms on education expenditures was muted in states that either had more slaves before abolition or cultivated cotton during colonial times.

This article studies the employment effects of one of the largest forced population movements in history, the influx of millions of German expellees to West Germany after World War II. This episode of forced mass migration provides a unique setting to study the causal effects of immigration. Expellees were not selected on the basis of skills or labor market prospects and, as ethnic Germans, were close substitutes to native West Germans. Expellee inflows substantially reduced native employment. The displacement effect was, however, highly nonlinear and limited to labor market segments with very high inflow rates.

Theories of the demographic transition often center on the rising price of children. A model of fertility derived from household production in the antebellum United States contains both own children and slaves as inputs. Changes in slaveholdings beget changes in the marginal product of the slaveowners’ own children and, hence, their price. I use panel data on slaveowning households between 1850 and 1870 to measure the slaveowners’ own fertility responses to exogenous changes in slaveholdings. Results indicate a strong, negative correlation between own child prices and fertility.

The passage of the National Banking Acts stabilized the existing financial system and encouraged the entry of 729 banks between 1863 and 1866. These new banks concentrated in the area that would eventually become the Manufacturing Belt. Using a new bank census, the article shows that these changes to the financial system were a major determinant of the geographic distribution of manufacturing and the nation's sudden capital deepening. The entry not only resulted in more manufacturing capital and output at the county level, but also more steam engines and value added at the establishment level.

Careful handling of an eclectic data set reveals how unequal were the incomes of different classes of Russians on the eve of Revolution. We estimate incomes by economic and social class in each of the fifty provinces of European Russia. On the eve of military defeat and the 1905 Revolution, Russian income inequality was middling by the standards of that era, and less severe than is inequality today in China, the United States, and Russia itself. We note how the interplay of some distinctive fiscal and relative-price features of Imperial Russia might have shaped the now-revealed level of inequality.

Using an event study approach, we find the announcement by the Bank of France in 1907 to accelerate gold payments directly for U.S. crops is associated with the ultimate upturn in U.S. equity prices. Spillover to the French financial markets accompanied the Regents’ decision to release sterilized reserves, thereby arresting the drainage of coin in French circulation. Counterfactual analysis shows that the facility alone would have been unlikely to end the crisis. Investors may have revised equity expectations upward, recognizing that the acceleration in reliable seasonal gold flows would relieve monetary stringency.

Industrial investment in colonial India was segregated by the export industries, such as tea and jute that relied on British firms and the import substituting cotton textile industry that was dominated by Indian firms. Empirical evidence in this article does not suggest that barriers to entry faced by Indian entrepreneurs created this separation. Informational asymmetry played an important role. British entrepreneurs knew the export markets and the Indian entrepreneurs were familiar with local markets. Conditional on the initial advantage in entry, social network effects determined subsequent entry of firms by ethnicity and created separate spheres of industrial investment.

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.

We investigate how technology has influenced the size of armies. During the nineteenth century, the development of the railroad made it possible to field and support mass armies, significantly increasing the observed size of military forces. During the late twentieth century, further advances in technology made it possible to deliver explosive force from a distance and with precision, making mass armies less desirable. We find support for our technological account using a new data set covering thirteen great powers between 1600 and 2000. We find little evidence that the French Revolution was a watershed in terms of levels of mobilization.

Following Waterloo, managing French public finances represented a daunting task as the country had lost a substantial part of its population and territory and had to pay huge amounts as reparations to the victors. Despite this, in just ten years, France managed to issue substantial amounts of debt with a spread, compared to the British consol, falling from more than 400 to 100 basis points. We argue that the Duke of Wellington was key in creating an environment in which Baring had an incentive to lend to France and all actors had an incentive to see French debts reimbursed.