The article develops a model of gold-standard efficiency in the context of the theory of efficient asset markets. Efficiency is measured by the ratio of experienced disutility to the hypothetical loss under perfect gold arbitrage and neutral exchange-rate speculation. Dollar-sterling gold-point estimates for 1890 to 1906 are generated using the methodology of focusing on the dominant arbitrageurs, the prevailing exchange instrument, and the primary form of gold shipped. Gold- standard efficiency is remarkably high and only marginally below exchange- market efficiency from 1950 to 1966 under Bretton Woods.

Analysis of the spatial pattern of prices and output in the manuscript returns of the French agricultural census of 1852 indicates that the availability of market outlets was probably the dominant factor determining the rise in agricultural productivity prior to the mid-nineteenth century and that agricultural supply was probably price elastic. The belief that the period of the industrial revolution was one of inelastic agricultural supply is shown to rest on a misinterpretation of the extant data on agricultural prices.

As the American South commenced its modern industrialization in the late nineteenth century, it found itself handicapped not simply by its poverty, but also by its lack of institutionalized means for mobilizing investment capital for manufacturing. Using evidence from the first major southern manufacturing region, the Carolina Piedmont, we argue that the resulting high information and transactions costs forced industrial promoters to rely heavily upon small, local investors who preferred safety to innovation. As a result, southern manufacturing firms were hampered in their flexibility, and southern industrial structure was skewed toward mature industries with little developmental potential.

Tontines were used more extensively by France than Britain. Comparative tontine history illuminates the differing evolution of public finance in the two countries and its political consequences. Archival materials establish the number of participants in French tontines. Internal rates of return on tontines and alternatives show subsidy of tontines by the French government. Repudiation in 1770 contributed to the political attitudes of life annuitants, the most important class of state creditors, during the fiscal crisis of the late 1780s.

Coal company towns were infamous, being described as exploitive, and charged with providing low-quality services, like sanitation. Yet, the quality of sanitation in coal towns in 1922 appears similar to that in cities of similar size, although lagging behind that in major cities. Within the coal region, company and independent towns provided similar levels of sanitation. The quality of sanitation in company towns varied in response to cost-related factors, including town age, population, and natural location. Meanwhile, workers were mobile and demanded compensating increases in wage rates in towns with lower-quality sanitation and higher rents.

This article examines the economic and noneconomic factors that influenced the migration decisions of antebellum Southern households. It appears that nonslaveowners were neither pushed to inferior locations nor did they move independently of the economic consequences. For slaveowners, the observed links between locational choice and the economic characteristics of locations are weaker. The proportion of whites in a location's population was positively associated with the choice of a location for the nonslaveowners. This association was not found for any other group.

In the 1986 volume of this JOURNAL we discussed the frequency of retirement and downward occupational mobility (on-the-job retirement) of older men in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.1 As we noted, study of retirement in the years before World War II is hampered by the lack of data on the labor force status of individuals. Indeed, until the concept of “gainful employment” was replaced by that of the “labor force” in 1940, the official census figures on occupations contained a large proportion of older men and women who by today's standard would be regarded as retired2.