This article explores wealth accumulation among European immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1840 and 1850. It uses a new sample of immigrants linked from passenger-ship records to the 1850 and 1860 federal census manuscripts. These immigrants rapidly accumulated real and personal wealth. Their real wealth grew 10 percent with each year≈s residence in the United States. This was not because immigrants arriving in the early 1840s were wealthier at arrival than later arrivals, nor was the rapid accumulation of wealth confined to one nationality or occupation. Rather, it reflects these immigrants≈ abilities to adapt to new circumstances after their arrival.

The Industrial Revolution as a historical concept has many shortcomings. A new concept—the “industrious revolution”—is proposed to place the Industrial Revolution in a broader historical setting. The industrious revolution was a process of household-based resource reallocation that increased both the supply of marketed commodities and labor and the demand for market-supplied goods. The industrious revolution was a household-level change with important demand-side features that preceded the Industrial Revolution, a supply-side phenomenon. It has implications for nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic history.

We explore the savings behavior of ordinary Americans through their accounts at the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, the oldest mutual savings bank in the United States. Our sample contains all 2,374 accounts opened in 1850. Savings accounts were generally brief affairs, but median balances mounted to about three-quarters of annual income in three years. Deposits and withdrawals were infrequent, but substantial. Only female servants, as a group, used their accounts for life-cycle savings, eventually amassing large nest eggs. Men often used them to hold funds before acquiring physical property. We estimate saving rates between 10 and 15 percent on active accounts.

This article uses the Bateman-Weiss samples of manufacturing firms from 1850 and 1860 to estimate the labor and total factor productivity of southern and midwestern manufacturing industries in the late antebellum period. The results indicate rapid growth in productivity, especially in the South. The article also demonstrates a positive association between measured productivity, firm size, and urbanization. Differences in manufacturing performance between the South and the Midwest are shown to be crucially dependent on the extent of markets within the two regions.

Although the late medieval Commercial Revolution is considered to be a watershed in the economic history of Europe, the analysis of the interrelationship between political and economic systems in bringing about this period of economic growth has been neglected. This article conducts such an analysis with respect to the city of Genoa during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Viewing political institutions as self-enforcing agreements rather than as exogenous rules, I present and analyze the nature and evolution of Genoa's political systems and the relations between these systems and economic growth.

This article concerns female labor, guild organization, and eighteenth-century political economy. The first half of the article analyzes the changing relations between the major men's and women's guilds in the Parisian clothing trades, the norms that governed those relations, and the social and economic forces that reshaped them. The second half focuses on pre-revolutionary petitions from the guilds, which illustrate dramatically the different ways in which guildsmen and women interpreted the rules of gender in the corporate order. The guildswomen's distinctive perspective reflected their history, experience, and changing currents of economic thought.

This paper explores the phenomenon of “job-loan trading”—in which employers offered jobs in exchange for substantial loans from their new employees—as practiced in mid-nineteenth-century California. A sample of newspaper advertisements from 1857–76 reveals that despite the obvious inefficiencies of linking labor and capital markets, job-loan trading was both common and profitable. I assess labor market bonding against moral hazard or adverse selection as a possible explanation, but conclude that the job-loan trades primarily provide evidence of substantial Pacific Coast capital market imperfections. This conclusion has implications for the broader question of how financial markets develop.

Census and tax data for three counties in the Georgia Piedmont in 1860 and 1880 are used to analyze changes in crop-choice decisions after the Civil War. Although changes in the lower and upper Piedmont were similar, the explanations for these changes in the two areas differ in important respects. In the upper Piedmont the use of fertilizer is a very important explanator, whereas race and tenure are of little significance. Fertilizer is also an important explanator in the lower Piedmont, but so are race, tenure, and poverty of farm operators.

Europeans stopped using servitude to finance passage to America sometime in the early nineteenth century, but exactly when and why immigrant servitude disappeared is a mystery. Hypotheses abound, but no consensus has emerged nor have scholars tested hypotheses. In this study, quantitative evidence for the final sixty years of immigrant servitude establishes when and why it disappeared. Servitude did not end because of insufficient demand, legal restrictions, or declines in passage fares. It ended because superior methods of financing migration developed. Chance historical events, however, determined the exact timing of the end.

The re-emergence of AT&T as the dominant firm in the telephone industry resulted from its adopting a predatory response to entrants. AT&T's strategy was effective because government regulations and capital market imperfections provided the incumbent with a first-mover advantage that prevented challengers from entering simultaneously in all markets.

Using a complete enumeration of credit contracts for a rural area in Burgundy, this article examines how credit markets functioned and what role they served. Credit markets distributed funds to a large fraction of the population, and they were organized to mediate problems of asymmetric information. A central constraint on credit markets, however, was the threat of government intervention. Because of this threat, capital markets remained relatively isolated from one another.

Economic analysis of the labor supply of married women has long emphasized the impact of the unemployment of husbands—the added worker effect. This article re-examines the magnitude of the added worker effect in the waning years of the Great Depression. Previous studies of the labor supply of married women during this period failed to take account of various institutional features of New Deal work relief programs, which reduced the size of the added worker effect.

This article argues that the banking crises and collapse of the international gold standard in the early 1930s contributed to the severity of the Great Depression by increasing interest-rate uncertainty. Two pieces of evidence support this conclusion. First, uncertainty (as measured by the risk premium embedded in the term structure of interest rates) rises during the banking crises and is positively linked to financial-market volatility associated with the breakdown in the gold standard. Second, the risk premium explains a significant proportion of the variation in aggregate investment spending during the Great Depression.

This article reopens the classic debate about the relationship between the city and the countryside in medieval/Renaissance Italy. It examines city-countryside relations in Siena in the second half of the fourteenth century and compares them with what we know of Siena≈s northern neighbor, Florence. It argues that Sienese policy was moderate and even-handed and, despite similar pressures, less harsh than that of the Florentines. The difference is explained by the fact that Siena was economically far less potent and thus ever mindful that its own fate was intrinsically linked with that of the countryside.

In the interwar period, Japanese textile firms were able to greatly increase labor efficiency and become the world's main exporter of cotton textiles. Meanwhile, the Indian industry stagnated and was forced to retreat behind tariff walls. This paper argues that the flexibility of the Japanese work force stemmed from its high turnover; the Indian laborers were collectively inflexible in defending lifetime careers against technical changes that reduced labor demand. As the industry requires only a few easily acquired skills, a committed work force was actually a disadvantage to Indian management.

This article evaluates the consistency of the NBER business cycle reference dates. It finds that the early reference dates are derived from detrended data, whereas the dates after 1927 are derived from data in levels. To evaluate the importance of this and other changes in technique, I derive a simple algorithm that matches the postwar NBER peaks and troughs closely. When this algorithm is applied to data for 1884 to 1940, the new prewar dates differ systematically from the NBER dates and challenge the conventional view that recessions have gotten shorter over time.

The Spanish Monarchy pursued a rational policy of price discrimination among its Castilian currencies while financing its early-seventeenth-century wars. Large-denomination gold and silver coins circulated internationally, forcing the Monarchy to act more competitively and not seek additional short-run revenue. In contrast, petty coinage was a local monopoly. The Monarchy raised seigniorage rates and issued large quantities, generating large revenues. The nominal petty money stock grew rapidly, then fluctuated. The real petty money stock grew, then varied little as petty currency depreciation dampened nominal changes.

By surveying contemporary sources this article reveals direct evidence for the involvement of the South Sea Company in the passage of the Bubble Act. The dominant position of the Company and of its national debt conversion scheme in the affairs of England in 1720 support the conclusion that the act was in fact a piece of special-interest legislation for the Company. The short-term interest that motivated the enactment, together with the limited legal and economic effects of the act, minimized its significance as a turning point in the long-term development of the English joint-stock company.

The United States economy completed its recovery from the Great Depression in 1942, restoring full-employment output in that year after 12 years of below-full-employment performance. Fiscal policies were not the most important factor in the 1933 through 1940 phase of the recovery, but they became the most important factor after 1940, when the recovery was less than half-complete. World War II fiscal policies were, then, instrumental in the overall restoration of full-employment performance.

This article asks whether the vaunted comparative stability of the Canadian banking system has been purchased at the cost of creating an oligopoly. We assembled a data set that compares bank failures, lending rates, interest paid on deposits, and related variables over the period 1920 to 1980. Our principal findings are (1) interest rates paid on deposits were generally higher in Canada; (2) interest income received on securities was generally slightly higher in Canada; (3) interest rates charged on loans were generally quite similar; and (4) net rates of return to equity were generally higher in Canada than in the United States.