I study the mobility and economic outcomes of European immigrants and their children in nineteenth-century Argentina, the second largest destination country during the Age of Mass Migration. I use new data linking males across censuses and passenger lists of arrivals to Buenos Aires. First-generation immigrants experienced faster occupational upgrading than natives. Occupational mobility was substantial relative to Europe; immigrants holding unskilled occupations upon arrival experienced high rates of occupational upgrading. Second-generation immigrants outperformed the sons of natives in terms of literacy, occupational status and access to property, and experienced higher rates of intergenerational mobility out of unskilled occupations.

This article examines the causes and variation of language standardization across European ethnic groups from a historical perspective. Although language has long garnered interest in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, how language becomes standardized has yet to be offered. In this article, I argue that the acquisition of the printing press is critical to explaining the occurrence and variation of standardization. Using the first publication of vernacular dictionaries as a proxy for standardization, I present a systematic investigation of the standardization process for 171 ethnic groups in Europe from 1400–2000 ce. Empirical tests come from an original data set that collects information on political, economic, and social dimensions. Findings from event history models show that (1) printing press adoption is positively and significantly correlated with vernacular dictionaries; and (2) early adopters are more likely to standardize vernaculars than latecomers.

When private incentives are insufficient, a big push by government may lead to industrialization. This article uses mobilization for WWII to test the big push hypothesis in the context of postwar industrialization in the American South. Specifically, I investigate the role of capital deepening at the county level using newly assembled data on the location and value of wartime investment. Despite a boom in manufacturing activity during the war, the evidence is not consistent with differential postwar growth in counties that received more investment. This does not rule out positive effects of mobilization on firms or sectors, but a decisive role for wartime capital deepening in the South's postwar industrial development should be viewed more skeptically.

In this article, we study the emergence of an extractive institution that hampered economic development in Italy for more than a century: the Sicilian mafia. Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the reasons behind the rise of the Sicilian mafia have remained a puzzle. In this article, we argue that the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind's discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More specifically, we claim that mafia appeared in locations where producers made high profits from citrus production for overseas export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the mafia protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881–1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry, we show that mafia presence is strongly related to the production of oranges and lemons. The results hold when different data sources and several controls are employed.

We identify the longest expansion in U.S. history, a recession-free 16-year period from 1841 to 1856 that we call America's First Great Moderation. Using newer data on industrial production, we show that the record-long expansion was primarily driven by a boom in transportation-goods investment following the discovery of gold in California. Furthermore, the low volatility of industrial production and stock returns during the First Great Moderation, which occurred during a period without a U.S. central bank, is similar to that observed for the Second Great Moderation (1984–2007).

The Bureau du Commerce allocated rights and rents to private entrepreneurs via a mix of hierarchical division of labor and peer-based collegial deliberation. This set-up reflected an attempt to maximize information and expertise, but also allowed for the recognition of private rights and social interests. The final decisions of the Bureau (for or against each demand), and the qualitative arguments brought forward during the procedure, are robust predictors of eventual decisions. We see this result as an indication that impersonal, rational and informed decision-making could be obtained even within a patrimonialist, rent-seeking State.

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported in Lloyd's Registers are shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.

We present a new monthly index of the yields on junk bonds (high risk, high yield bonds) for the period 1910–1955. This index supplements the indexes of government bond yields, and Aaa and Baa corporate bond yields economic historians have relied on previously to describe the long-term risk spectrum. First, we describe our sources and methods. Then we show that our junk bond index contains information that is not in the closest alternative, and suggest some ways that the junk bond index could be used to enrich our understanding of the turbulent middle years of the twentieth century.