The article quantifies the impact of cheap grain on the European economy in the late nineteenth century. Falling transport costs led to dramatic declines in Anglo-American grain price gaps, but price convergence was less impressive between the U.S. and other European economies, and within Europe. Cheaper grain meant lower rents throughout Europe, and protection boosted rents, but the magnitudes involved differed between countries. Similarly, cheap grain increased real wages in Britain, but lowered them elsewhere. The grain invasion implied different shocks across countries, and this partly explains the varying trade policies pursued in Europe during this period.

Strange as it seems, the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff might have had an expansionary effect on the U.S. economy. Basic macroeconomic principles indicate that the direct effect of a tariff increase is expansionary. This expansionary effect might be offset by retaliatory increases in foreign tariffs. Barry Eichengreen has recently questioned whether significant retaliation to Smoot-Hawley occurred. This article demonstrates that the tariff increases enacted during 1930 in Canada—the largest trading partner of the United States—were in direct response to Smoot-Hawley. The conventional wisdom that Smoot-Hawley hurt the U.S. economy may be right after all.

Manorial accounts allow detailed investigation of the market involvement of medieval seignorial demesnes. Production decisions taken locally emerge as strongly, if indirectly, influenced by the market. Disposal decisions, in contrast, were much more a matter of estate policy and therefore of institutional factors. Probably because of differential transaction costs, many lords preferred to provision their households directly from their estates rather than sell the bulk of their produce and purchase most of their provisions. The forces promoting commercialization within the seignorial arable sector appear to have been stronger at the opening than the close of the fourteenth century.

Although its role has been overlooked by monetary historians, a two-cent tax on bank checks effective from June 1932 through December 1934 appears to have been an important contributing factor to that period's severe monetary contraction. According to the estimates in this article, the currency–demand deposit ratio was about 15 percent higher, and the M1 money stock about 12 percent smaller, ceteris paribus, than each would have been without the tax. The contractionary consequences had in fact been anticipated by many legislators who were, nevertheless, unable to prevent the measure from being included in the Revenue Act of 1932.

Ongoing research on British overseas trade does not support supply-side explanations of British industrialization. Contrary to widely publicized views, the share of British industrial exports in alternative measures of industrial output rose almost continuously throughout the period 1723 to 1851. This finding rests on the official values of British domestic exports, and it is confirmed by new annual estimates of Britain's domestic export, and it is confirmed by new annual estimates of Britain's domestic export values at current an constant prices form 1772 to 1821. Further research on prices, and on Britain's strikingly underutilized trade records, may lead to a more balanced perception of supply and demand forces during the Industrial Revolution.

Wealth and asset holding in late-nineteenth-century Ontario are examined using a new data set of census-linked probated decedents. Hump-shaped wealth-age profiles are found, supporting the importance of demographic and life cycle forces in late-nineteenth-century financial asset accumulation. With financial asset holding more pronounced in Ontario than Quebec, the implication for Canadian economic development is that the differences in capital formation and industrialization across Ontario and Quebec are partly rooted in saving behavior. The results show that urbanization, occupational status, literacy, the number of children, and region of residence are important determinants of wealth and asset holding.

The return of growth theory to center stage in mainstream economics provides opportunities for historians to reconsider the forces shaping longer-term economic development. A key motivation for developing new growth modeling strategies lay in the desire to reestablish contact between theory and the empirics of economic growth. By postulating diminishing returns to capital, the traditional neoclassical paradigm precludes the sustaining of per capita growth in the absence of exogenous technological progress. Since historical records of economic development offer scant evidence for declining per capita growth, disenchantment grew with a theoretical perspective that leaves the crucial part of the empirical record unexplained, prompting a search for alternative modeling strategies.

David Greasley and Les Oxley provide an interesting but ultimately unconvincing chalenge to the perspective on the British Industrial Revolution that we have set out in recent articles1. We believe that the issues that they raise are important and deserve a full response. Thus, we take the opportunity to clarify ideas on growth theory and its implications for growth accounting, to review the econometrics of estimating trend growth in an economy undergoing structural change, and to reconsider the persuasiveness of different views of the nature of technological change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The origins of this exchange stem from an important paper by N. F. R. Crafts, Steven Leybourne, and Terence Mills, which argues that underlying trends in British industrial output for the period 1700 to 1913 are stochastic rather than linearly deterministic. Using parsimonious methods, we propose an alternative view that the output series have alternating stochastic properties. Specifically we distinguish the period 1780 to 1851 as an Industrial Revolution epoch during which shocks had long-term effects. Out model simplifies to help understand the complexities of the Industrial Revolution, and we agree with Clive Granger and Zhuanxin Ding, that “While it is correct to search over a specific set of parsimonious models … the model so achieved is, at best, an approximation to the truth”.