This paper examines the role of aggregate-demand stimulus in ending the Great Depression. Plausible estimates of the effects of fiscal and monetary changes indicate that nearly all the observed recovery of the U.S. economy prior to 1942 was due to monetary expansion. A huge gold inflow in the mid- and late 1930s swelled the money stock and stimulated the economy by lowering real interest rates and encouraging investment spending and purchases of durable goods. That monetary developments were crucial to the recovery implies that self-correction played little role in the growth of real output between 1933 and 1942.

Seventeenth-century English immigrants to the Chesapeake and their children experienced a trade-off. They died early and raised few children who survived to adulthood, most worked harder than in England at more boring tasks, and, except for food, they had a material standard of living inferior to what the homeland could offer at equivalent levels of wealth; but people ate well, there was work for all, and until late in the century the poor who lived long enough found opportunities not available in England to exercise control of their lives—opportunities to acquire land and the economic independence and community standing that it brought.

This article offers a new quantitative history of the market for government debt in France before the Revolution. The monarchy was a persistent default risk because of institutional obstacles to raising taxes. Default followed observable rules in targeting specific assets. The financial market reflected both facts: interest rates were high on the safest assets and ranged higher on the most likely default targets. The cost of all forms of new borrowing became substantially higher than the yields on old debt, resulting in increasing government reliance on expensive life annuities.

This article proposes a reinterpretation of the failure of interwar British productivity levels to match those of the United States. We argue that key elements in poor British productivity performance included inadequate human capital, a bargaining environment that allowed workers to maintain restrictive practices, and collusive agreements that limited the exit of inefficient firms. We suggest that weaknesses in the structure of British firms pointed out by Chandler and his followers have been overemphasized and that more attention should be given to the role of the market environment in determining the conduct of business.

Relying on a large sample of private and public loan contracts taken from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the private borrowers and lenders who participated in the credit market between 1690 and 1840. It explains the important role notaries played in the market, describes the types of loans available to borrowers and lenders, stresses the importance of the life cycle in explaining the recourse to indebtedness, and ends with a discussion of the difficulties lenders had in assessing creditworthiness.

Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.

Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated character slowed the growth of full employment output toward the end of the 1920s. The physical and legal detritus of unregulated land development posed continuing obstacles to recovery during the second half of the 1930s.

Although the American cotton textile industry was heavily protected, most commentators, following Frank Taussig's lead, have concluded that indigenous technological advance made large branches of the industry internationally competitive by the 1830s. The prices of equivalent fabrics in Britain and America in the late 1840s and 1850s challenge that conclusion. “Domestic” fabrics, in which American mills had supposedly become competitive, cost 20 percent more in America. Critical reexamination of other evidence—cost comparisons from the 1830s and American exports—supports the conclusion that an unprotected American industry could not have competed.

This article examines the contribution of government policies to the high number of bank failures in the United States during the 1920s. In the state of Kansas, which had a system of voluntary deposit insurance and where branch banking was strictly prohibited, bank failure rates were highest in counties suffering the greatest agricultural distress and where deposit insurance system membership was highest. The evidence for Kansas illustrates how prohibitions on branch banking caused unit banks to be especially vulnerable to local economic shocks and suggests that deposit insurance caused more bank failures than would have occurred otherwise.

Studies of postbellum financial markets have shown that the United States was not served by an integrated short-term capital market until the turn of the twentieth century. Until recently the data necessary for the study of a similar phenomenon in the antebellum period have not been available. This article reports several new regional interest rate series for the antebellum era that show that antebellum credit markets were more integrated than postbellum markets.

The Postan thesis is that medieval agriculture had low yields because there was insufficient pasture to keep the arable land fertile. This argument (and variants of it) has become an orthodox technological explanation for low preindustrial yields. Yet the thesis, on its face, implies that early cultivators were ignorant, irrational, or completely custom bound. This article develops a revised Postan thesis, in which medieval cultivators knew that pasture restored fertility but were unwilling to employ it. Impatience made this way of increasing yields unattractive because it required large capital investments in the soil nitrogen stock.

Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is the cause of high machinery investment or that a high rate of machinery investment is a good proxy for other factors that are important causes of growth.

Technological progress depends for its success on a conducive social environment. The resistance to innovation is identified as a central element governing the success of new inventions. Such resistance usually takes the form of non-market processes. It consists of vested interests, whose assets are jeopardized by new techniques, as well as by intellectuals who are opposed to new technology on principle. The role of resistance in the British and French economies during the Industrial Revolution is assessed.

The Bank Panic of 1907 was one of the most severe financial crises in the United States before the Great Depression. Although contemporaries realized that the panic in New York City was centered at trust companies, subsequent research has relied heavily on national bank data. Balance sheet data for trust companies and state banks as well as call reports of national banks indicate that the contraction of loans and deposits in New York City during the panic was confined to the trust companies.

Early twentieth-century social reformers claimed that public insurance was necessary because employers ignored the financial needs of their unemployed, injured, or ill workers. Reformers dismissed the idea that competition in the labor market would boost the wages of workers who faced greater chances of job-related financial distress. This article reports a test of the compensating-wage-difference hypothesis on wage samples of men, women, and children from 1884 to 1903. We found mixed support for the reformers' claims: unemployment risk tended to be fully compensated; accident risk was only partially compensated; and occupational illness went unremunerated.

The incidence of fatherlessness among English emigrant servants was measured using contracts recorded in London between 1682 and 1686. This incidence was relatively high and systematically related to the servant's age, gender, county of origin, occupation, and father's occupation. Many emigrant servants were youths who had lost their fathers and lacked alternative support in England. Fatherlessness helps explain why the short-run supply of emigrant servants was relatively inelastic, and why some unskilled servants continued to migrate to America in spite of competition from slave labor.

This article examines the causes for the relatively high degree of vertical integration in the German cotton textile industry before 1914. Underdeveloped input and output markets exposed German textile firms to price risks not faced by English firms that had access to highly-developed cotton, yarn, and cloth markets. In addition, tariff protection may have prompted integration by its impact on market development. In the weaving sector in particular, the response to this structure of markets was a more diversified product line and integration of both spinning and weaving.

In 1942 the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve agreed to keep the interest rate on long-term government bonds below a ceiling of 2.5 percent. Assuming rational expectations, the ceiling on long-term interest rates can be viewed as a government commitment to low long-run inflation. The Fed also agreed to buy and sell short-term government bonds at a below-market rate of 3/8 percent. This policy did not result in long-run inflation because it was narrowly confined to 3-month Treasury bills.

We have used the household accounts of 1,350 husband-wife families to investigate trends in male earnings and family incomes. This evidence confirms the material progress suggested by trends in the real wage rates of adult males. But the budget data underscore occupational and regional distinctions, discontinuities in the growth process, and changes over time in the ability of other family members to offset the effects of the business cycle on men's earnings. Overall, family incomes grew less than male earnings.

Domestic slave traders selected taller slaves for shipment to the New Orleans market in order to increase their profits. Because traded slaves made up a large share of the slaves shipped coastwise, age/height profiles constructed from the shipping manifests are biased upwards. The extent of the bias appears to be small for adult slaves but not for children; those listed on the manifests were taller than the general population of a comparable age.