In the 1730s and 1750s the English government proposed to refinance the redeemable debt by “lowering the interest rate.” In the ensuing coordination game among creditors, large investors like the Bank of England could block the policy change by demanding cash. Using 4 percent and 3 percent annuities prices to analyze market expectations, this article studies two refinancing episodes with very different fates. Lord Barnard failed in 1737 because his terms were too strict and financial agents induced a temporary market crash. Lord Pelham succeeded in 1750 because his better terms fit market prices, and interest rates had fallen much faster than expected.

The Mexican expropriation of 1938 was the first large-scale non-Communist expropriation of foreign-owned natural resource assets. The literature makes three assertions: the United States did not fully back the companies, Mexico did not fully compensate them for the value of their assets, and the oil workers benefitted from the expropriation. This article finds that none of those assertions hold. The companies devised political strategies that maneuvered a reluctant President Roosevelt into supporting their interests, and the Mexican government more than fully compensated them as a result. Neither wages for oil workers nor Mexican government oil revenue rose after the expropriation.

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers' reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from contemporary sources.

“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything. Eulogy is invariably dull—a fact that Mr. Alf had discovered and utilized.”

A. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875

“And did you threaten him with the newspapers?”

H. de Balzac, La maison Nucingen, 1837

Using longitudinal data linked to the 1850 and 1860 U.S. federal census manuscript schedules, this article examines the effect of migration to high-risk malaria counties on real estate wealth accumulation. Although the migrants recognized the risk of malaria, they still migrated to malarial regions. Those who migrated to areas with higher risk of malaria experienced smaller increases in real estate wealth than migrants to less malarial areas. The findings in this study provide historical evidence with which to estimate the potential modern-day economic benefit of malarial eradication.

The last remaining gap in the national accounts of Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century, 1913 to 1928, includes the Great War, the Civil War, and postwar recovery. Filling this gap, we find that the Russian economy did somewhat better in the Great War than was previously thought; in the Civil War it did correspondingly worse; war losses persisted into peacetime, and were not fully restored under the New Economic Policy. We compare this experience across regions and over time. The Great War and Civil War produced the deepest economic trauma of Russia's troubled twentieth century.

We explore the effects of human capital on workers during the latter nineteenth century by examining the U.S. Navy. Naval officers belonged either to a regular or an engineer corps and had tasks assigned for their specialized training. We compile education and career data for officers from Naval Academy and navy registers for the years 1858 to 1907. Wage premia for “engineer-skilled” officers deteriorated over their careers; more traditionally skilled officers enjoyed higher gains in earnings and more frequent promotions. This compelled those with engineering skills to leave the service early, hindering the navy's capacity to further technologically develop.

Using a novel data set on 2,483 British privateering cruises, we show that state-licensed raiding of commercial vessels was a popular and flourishing business among merchants that took a serious toll on enemy trade from 1689 to 1815. Why, then, did privateering merchants gradually turn away from these profitable endeavors? We show that the expansion of overseas trade increased the opportunity costs for merchants and resulted in the decline of privateering. Our findings document that the decline of privateering had as much to do with an expanding maritime economy as with the rising naval power of the British state.

By analyzing a newly compiled database of exchange rates, this article finds that in Central Europe money markets integrated cyclically during the fifteenth century. The cycles were associated with monetary debasements. Long-distance financial integration progressed in connection with the rise of the territorial state, facilitated by the synergy between princes and emperor, which helped to avoid coordination failures. For Central Europe, theories of state formation and market integration should therefore take interstate actors into account.