In seventeenth-century England the relatively open trades to America attracted ventures by hundreds of small merchants and shopkeepers. This ease of entry was checked after 1685 by very high customs duties on tobacco and intense regulation. Between 1685 and 1775 the number of firms in that trade was radically reduced and the size of the average firm increased ten to thirtyfold. Comparable if less extreme trends can be detected in the sugar, slave, and Levant trades. Insurance enabled large firms to use shipping more efficiently. The increased availability of credit also benefited larger and more secure firms.

The traditional view of cotton mechanization, first advanced by rural sociologists in the 1920s, is that southern agrarian institutions impeded progress. Recently their view has been questioned. New studies attribute much of the southern lag to factors like small-scale production, cheap labor, the cotton crop, and environment. I contribute to the debate by emphasizing how the structure of the southern economy encouraged landlords to use annual labor contracts that hindered attempts to mechanize. I present evidence that supports the traditional view and suggest how the incentive structure of annual labor contracts delayed invention of the mechanical cotton picker.

Scholars still disagree about why nineteenth-century Britain adopted the factory system. Traditional historians emphasize the scale requirements of new technology; radical economists stress the possibilities that factory production held for worker exploitation; other economists and economic historians argue that the factory system was preferred because of its superior transaction-cost properties. This paper tests these competing hypotheses by examining the technological and organizational developments in the British silk industry. It concludes that in this Industry technological factors were primarily responsible for the adoption of the factory system.

This article explores the operation of the international capital market between Amsterdam and London in the early eighteenth century and concludes that both markets were efficient and well integrated from 1723 on.

Available evidence on interest rates and government borrowing during Britain's industrial revolution, while limited, does not support the idea that war spending crowded out private investment. This article demonstrates the importance of using data on net receipts from borrowing, rather than changes in government debt. Weaknesses of the crowding-out model concerning capital markets and investment, openness of the economy, and full employment are identified for the historical case. The case raises broader issues of whether conceptions of saving and investment based in neoclassical supply-constrained models are as appropriate as theories of capital accumulation.

In 1910 one New England cotton textile operative performed as much work as 1.5 British, 2.3 German, and nearly 6 Greek, Japanese, Indian, or Chinese workers. Input substitution, and differences in technology, management, and workers' training or inherent abilities do not explain this. Instead local culture seems to have determined worker performance. Such differences, if widespread, would explain much of the international variation in wages. They also have important consequences for understanding labor migration, the choice of technique, and the sources of economic growth.

The failure of the Canadian Northern Railway is analyzed with a model of optimal capital structure drawn from finance theory. Ex ante bankruptcy probabilities, which are computed on the basis of different assumptions about investors' expectations, range from 40 to 90 percent; and our best estimate is about 70 percent. These high probabilities were a consequence of loan guarantees provided to the Canadian Northern by the federal and provincial governments. The guarantees induced the railway's promoters to undertake an ex ante unprofitable project and to finance that project almost exclusively with debt.

We are concerned here with the evasion of price controls in the United States and the United Kingdom in World War II. The evidence suggests that controls produced less evasive activity in the United Kingdom. After considering several explanations we conclude that the key was the degree of regimentation. The British controlled all stages of production, limited the range of products available at each stage, and allocated relatively more resources to managing and enforcing controls.