Extreme variation in the extent of inequality emerged early across the New World colonies established by the Europeans, and we hypothesized in previous work that these contrasts persisted over time through systematic differences in the ability and inclination of elites to shape legal frameworks to advantage themselves. We find support for this view in how the rules governing the extension of suffrage evolved over time within the United States, and across the societies of the Americas. Polities with labor scarcity and greater equality generally led in broadening the franchise and attaining high rates of participation in elections.

Before the eighth–ninth centuries CE, most Jews, like the rest of the population, were farmers. With the establishment of the Muslim Empire, almost all Jews entered urban occupations despite no restrictions prohibiting them from remaining in agriculture. This occupational selection remained their distinctive mark thereafter. Our thesis is that this transition away from agriculture into crafts and trade was the outcome of their widespread literacy prompted by a religious and educational reform in Judaism in the first and second centuries CE, which gave them a comparative advantage in urban, skilled occupations. We present evidence that supports our argument.

Agricultural distress in the 1920s is routinely quoted among the causes of the Great Depression. This article challenges the conventional wisdom. World agriculture was not plagued by overproduction and falling terms of trade. The indebtedness of American farmers, a legacy of the boom years 1918–1921, did jeopardize the rural banks, but the relation between their crises, the banking panic of 1930, and the Great Depression is tenuous at best.

Conventional studies of the late-nineteenth-century international monetary system refer heuristically to “core” and “peripheral” countries. In this article, we seek to provide rigorous foundations to such expressions. Applying a formal procedure borrowed from network analysis produces indices of centrality and systematic rankings. We show that the international monetary system of the late nineteenth century is best described as a three-tier system. Other findings include the discovery of a closely knitted European foreign exchange system, a complete lack of foreign exchange linkages within Latin America, emerging intra-Asian relations, and a fairly late ascendancy of the U.S. dollar.

I use a rich new dataset of Louisiana slave records to answer long-standing questions about manumission. I examine who was manumitted, by whom, and whether manumittees paid prices above market for their freedom, shedding some light on the debate of the efficiency of slavery. Legal changes after the Louisiana Purchase allow us to conclude that manumission laws were quite important in determining the terms at which manumission agreements were struck: when slaves lost the right to sue for self-purchase at market price, there was a precipitous drop in the number of manumissions, while prices paid increased.

I examine the portfolio allocations of women married in the years surrounding the 1870 Married Women's Property Act. The act, which gave women married after 1870 the right to own and control personal property, serves as a natural experiment to examine the extent to which individuals respond to changes in property law. I link wealth data to census information and find that, as a result of the act, women married after 1870 altered their portfolio allocations by shifting wealth-holding away from real property to personal property. The results indicate that the act greatly impacted the investment decisions of women.

We explore the dynamics of the agricultural ladder for black farmers in the U.S. South using individual-level data from a retrospective survey conducted in 1938 in Jefferson County, Arkansas. We develop and test hypotheses to explain the time spent as a tenant, sharecropper, and wage laborer. The most striking result of our analysis is the importance of individual characteristics in career mobility. In all periods—pre–World War I; the war years, and subsequent boom; the 1920s; and the Great Depression years—some farmers moved up the agricultural ladder quite rapidly while others remained stuck on a rung.

Movement from rung to rung has been predominantly in the direction of descent rather than ascent. … [There is] an increasing tendency for the rungs of the ladder to become bars—forcing imprisonment in a fixed social status from which it is increasingly difficult to escape.National Resources CommitteeNational Resources Committee, “Report.”

In prewar Japan, many banks were controlled by industrial companies through capital and personal relationships. The literature has pointed out that those banks engaged in unsound lending to their related companies, which resulted in damage to the financial system (organ bank hypothesis). In this article we examine this hypothesis by measuring director interlocking between banks and nonbanking companies. It was found that more than 80 percent of ordinary banks had director interlocking with at least one nonbanking company. Also, regression analyses confirmed that director interlocking had a negative effect on bank performance, especially for smaller banks.

Industries that have different structures in Europe than in America can teach useful lessons about industrial evolution. Despite similar initial histories, European professional sports leagues adopted team promotion and relegation, which facilitates much easier entry than is possible in North America, where leagues themselves create new franchises to sell to investors. By contrasting the histories of the English Football League and the National Baseball League, we show that their structures arose from differences in geographic compactness, the entertainment level of games, and territorial monopolies. As the evolution becomes more understandable, the persistence of the intercontinental difference becomes more problematic.